Entrepreneurship & Organization Management

Human Resource-based Competitive Advantage: The Case of Motivational Rents

Abstract

Aviad Pe’er A

This paper proposes a theory of whether, and under what circumstances, human resource practices aimed at creating high levels of aggregate employee motivation can be a source of sustainable competitive advantage. Drawing on the received literature in social psychology, it develops a three-dimensional conceptual framework of antecedents and consequences of employee motivation in an organizational setting. It determines that human resource practices that generate and capture superior levels of motivation rents can also generate sustainable competitive advantage, despite competitive pressures, when they are sufficiently tacit, causally ambiguity, and context specific.