Restoring Trust: The Role of HR in Corporate Governance

Abstract

Theories of knowledge-based competition focus on internal resources as the source of value creation. The HR architecture (Lepak & Snell, 1999) brought human resource management directly into this forum by developing a model of human capital allocation and management. We attempt to extend the HR architecture by introducing a framework of relational archetypes—entrepreneurial and cooperative—that are derived from unique combinations of three dimensions (cognitive, structural, and affective) that characterize internal and external relationships of core knowledge employees. Entrepreneurial archetypes facilitate value creation from external partnerships while cooperative archetypes facilitate value creation from internal partnerships. This paper identifies how each of these archetypes is managed by a corresponding HR configuration and how they together contribute to value creation by facilitating organizational learning via exploration and exploitation.