Essays on Human Capital Diversity, Mobility, and Integration

This thesis challenges some conventional understandings of strategic human capital in organizations and highlights the need for more nuanced and contextual perspectives in facilitating superior innovation performance. While much of previous research on strategic human capital examines how human capital diversity and mobility can be a critical source of a firm's competitive advantage primarily based on the resource-based view, our understanding of some of the essential micro-level individual constructs is still somewhat limited. Indeed, we still do not have a concrete answer to questions on whether and how teams or firms can achieve superior subsequent innovation performance from their human capital diversity and its integration or how human capital as a critical resource can be successfully redeployed. Throughout my three dissertation papers, I examine the microfoundations of a firm's innovation performance concerning human capital diversity, mobility, and integration. By combining insights from strategic human capital, human management, and sociology studies, I focus on how knowledge diversity, individual experience, and integration of human capital diversity can better explain subsequent individual and collective level innovation performance. In my first paper, I examine how co-ethnic collaborations can have differential impacts on individuals depending on the proportion or relative status of the ethnicity and level of ethnic homophily across ethnic groups. I find that ethnic singulars, who can benefit from ethnic diversity and still avoid potential complications from collaborating with the same ethnic individuals within a team, can mainly be beneficial in increasing team innovation performance. My second paper investigates whether within-firm mobility can still provide a relatively more effective resource redeployment strategy over between-firm mobility when mobility requires the same geographic relocations of the mobile individuals. More specifically, I find that the relative benefits of within-firm geographic mobility are much more nuanced than previously claimed, and this resource redeployment strategy should consider who and when to relocate employees at the firm more carefully. Lastly, my third paper examines the contextual understanding of the relationship between the integration of diverse ethnic individuals within the organization and the firm's innovation performance. I find the importance of promoting ethnic integration that can represent the proportion of the population of ethnically diverse individuals to facilitate successful innovation performance.