published as 'Signalling valuable human capital: Advocacy group work experience and its effect on employee pay in innovative firms' in: Strategic Management Journal, 2019, 40(4), 685-70;
How valuable is work experience with advocacy groups, e.g. Greenpeace, for new hires of innovative firms? We integrate strategic human capital with stakeholder theory and suggest that this experience creates scarce human capital (knowledge, skills, abilities) facilitating innovations acceptable and legitimate for stakeholders such as regulators or residents. We argue that such human capital is complementary to firm resources and leads to a value surplus.
Individuals with advocacy group work experience can subsequently appropriate at least parts of that surplus through higher salaries. Using matched data for 10,303 employees in Denmark, we find that new hires of innovative firms with advocacy group human capital enjoy salary premiums which are stronger in mature and technologically concentrated firms. Our findings have important implications for HR decision making.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.