STRATEGIC ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR (STROBE): THE MISSING VOICE IN THE STRATEGIC HUMAN CAPITAL CONVERSATION

The field of strategic human capital and the field of organizational behavior (OB) need each other they just don't know it. OB theories, constructs, and processes must be heard within the strategic human capital conversation because many of the questions being pursued by human capital scholars will benefit from consideration of OB constructs and phenomena. Simultaneously, OB scholarship will be significantly advanced by considering the context of strategic factor markets and reaching beyond performance to competitive advantage. This paper calls for a union between OB and strategic human capital resources within a new domain of scholarship called STROBE: STRategic Organizational BEhavior. A STROBE-based view leads to several novel observations: Many OB constructs and phenomena are resources that are also inherently firm-specific and lack efficient factor markets; OB resources may be valuable, rare, costly or difficult to imitate, and difficult to substitute; and OB resources may form complementarities with human capital resources that render all such resources firm-specific. Given these observations, OB resources may be a stronger determinant of competitive advantage than human capital resources.