Competitive advantage through general and mobile human capital. A study on Italian “Serie A” football

Abstract

In this study, we examine the contribution of, respectively, general and mobile human capital to organizational competitive advantage. Our findings suggest that general human capital and mobile human capital positively affect organizational results under recurrent human capital mobility. Thus, our study revises and extends the conceptual domain of the Resource-based View (RBV) of the firm, because it emphasizes the relevance of general human capital in the quest for competitive advantage and underscores that, in the presence of human capital recurrent mobility, organizations can take advantage of this contingency, instead of being hindered by it. Also, our study sheds new light on the complementarity between novel and existing human capital, because we empirically observe that the interplay between the former and the latter contributes to organizational advantage. Our research setting is the Italian Serie A professional football, from the 2017–2018 through the 2021–2022 season.