Human capital resource emergence: reflections, insights, and recommendations

Human capital resource emergence (HCRE) is fundamentally focused on elucidating the microfoundations that drive organizational-level linkages between firm strategy and outcomes. HCRE is the means by which individual differences and the interactions and exchanges – cognitive, motivational, affective, and behavioral – among individuals, shaped by the system context, are amplified and transformed to add value to the system. HCRE is fundamentally a dynamic process, and theory and research to examine it should be process oriented. Yet, most conventional approaches to thinking about it and studying it treat emergence as an inference to support aggregation of a static metric and are focused on relationships rather than processes per se. In this commentary, I discuss the multilevel theory underpinnings of emergence as a dynamic process; what is required to develop theory that is process oriented rather than relationship oriented; and advance computational models and agent-based simulation as vital tools for advancing process-oriented theory and research on HCRE.