The Role of Firm- Level Human Capital on Competitive Advantage in Knowledge-Based Organizations

By early 50’s most managers imagined the main success factor in the business to be the ability to attract financial and physical capitals. But today it is an accomplished fact that injecting considerable amounts of financial and physical capitals to such organizations has not led to an accelerated process of their success but those organizations with specialized and skillful human capitals have been able to use the physical and financial capitals to accelerate the process of their growth and development desirably. The present investigation tries to derive and test a number of indicators in the framework of human capital concept within knowledge-based organizations. The statistical population consists of 65 firms in Iran’s pharmaceutical industry, among which, 46 firms were selected as the sample and the questionnaire was distributed among 300 managers of these firms. Covariance analysis and structural equation model were used to analyze the research data. The results demonstrated that human capital could affect the competitive advantage in knowledge-based organizations.

Keywords:

Human Capital , Competitive Advantage , Knowledge-Based Organizations