From Executives to Vulnerable Employees: Essays on Human Capital and its link with Organizational Structure, Objectives and Performances

This dissertation looks primarily at human capital, in particular, executives (Top Management Team, after TMT) and their influence on the firm's success through their roles. Companies need to leverage on executives' potential to succeed, and one way is through their roles (i.e., the set of tasks and responsibilities). First, I investigate how companies' roles allow executives to express all their potential, contributing to firm success. Second, I explore if and how executives impact firm performance through the dimension, they are leading (i.e., their roles). These two ideas are investigated, respectively, in the first and second chapters. To deal with these questions, I exploit a creative setting, the fashion industry. Creative organizations are closely anchored to human capital. They need to capture the individual creative input in order to generate economic value. The core business of these firms is to innovate rapidly, and executives are fundamental to manage and integrate each component of the creative process: from novelty generation (e.g., the Creative Director), to sales (e.g., the Head of Retail), and resource management (e.g., the CFO). In particular, the first chapter investigates whether role separation between creative and business functions at the top of organizations enhances the company's creative conversion ability. Creative organizations' success highly depends on the ability to generate ideas that are converted into products recognized as creative and novel, i.e., their creative conversion ability. We found evidence that role separation increases creative conversion ability, and we also tested the mechanism of why this happens. With a CEO, the creative director can focus on creativity, and this enhances the chances to generate something extremely novel to be converted into a creative product. We also test a contingency of the model: effective collaboration. We found that role separation is more effective when the two collaborate. The second paper broadens the spectrum of executives by investigating functional TMT members in relation to firm performance. My claim is that, to shed light on firm success, it is vital to study each simultaneous TMT member's effect on multiple firms' performance dimensions. Past studies considered TMT as a unified team. However, executives usually stick to their roles, influencing the associated objectives. Consequently, they affect the related dimension of performance. Preliminary results show that TMT members in charge of output functions (related to market and product) exert more influence on product-related performance, while executives leading throughput functions (linked to efficiency and administration) affect mainly financial-related performance. The last paper, instead, changes the perspective from executives to vulnerable employees. Besides role and other organizational dynamics, executives, like every employee, are human beings. Given that vulnerability is an ontological condition, everyone can face vulnerability, and, ultimately, it affects their jobs. From a conceptual review, vulnerability is "the state and the feeling of individuals being fragile and under attacks, with the possibility of being physically or emotionally wounded by that." Acknowledging that we live in a world where there is growing uncertainty about the future, increasing the state of individual vulnerability to unforeseeable adverse events, this variable becomes central to firms' activities. People feeling vulnerable may experience negative emotions, a sense of weakness, and find difficulties in building relationships. That turns out to negatively impacting the firm's performance and activities. This paper proposal provides an initial effort to highlight how institutionalizing vulnerability can be a way to "humanize" firms, but also to transform the negative side of vulnerability into positive. We investigate this idea in an Italian company, whose business model's basis is vulnerability.