Abstract
Organizational capabilities are socially complex practices that determine a firm’s effectiveness in transforming inputs into outputs (Collis 1994). The resource-based view (RBV) thus theorizes that firms with capabilities that are valuable, rare, inimitable, and nonsubstitutable can achieve a sustainable competitive advantage by better leveraging their resources (Barney 1991; Wernerfelt 1984). A vast amount of literature has emerged in which organizational capabilities are central to explaining differences in performance outcomes (e.g. Slater, Olson and Hult 2006). However, as Zollo and Winter (1999) note, the RBV still lacks a solid account of how organizational capabilities come into existence. Despite their importance for firm prosperity and the increasing scholarly attention devoted to them, organizational capabilities remain underspecified (Kraatz and Zajac 2001) and empirical work on antecedents to capabilities is very rare (Danneels 2008; Newbert 2007). In particular, individual-level processes may play an important role in the origins of organizational capabilities (Felin and Foss 2005). We thus agree with Gavetti (2005: 599) who states that “research on capabilities needs microfoundations.”
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Kemper, J., Brettel, M. (2015). Social Capital as A Micro-Level Origin of Organizational Capabilities. In: Deeter-Schmelz, D. (eds) Proceedings of the 2010 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference. Developments in Marketing Science: Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11797-3_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11797-3_15
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