Intellectual capital and financial performance in social cooperative enterprises

By Nick Bontis, Massimo Ciambotti, Federica Palazzi, F. Sgrò. Journal of Intellectual Capital, 2018

160 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical evidence of the relationship between intellectual capital (IC) and economic performance, with focus on social cooperative enterprises (SCEs) that work in non-profit sectors. Design/methodology/approach A survey was developed and administered in Italy. A final sample of 151 SCEs participated in the study. Data were collected on IC measures, social enterprise activities and economic and mission-based performance outcomes. Findings Two hypotheses that proposed a positive association between IC sub-components (i.e. human capital, structural capital and relational capital) and the economic and mission-based performance of SCEs were tested. Findings highlight that human capital contributes to explain economic performance which is positively affected by the presence of graduate employees and value added per employee. However, economic performance is negatively affected by the yearly training per employee. In addition, human and relational capital contribute to explain mission-based performance which is positively affected by yearly training, the value added per employee and the quality of relationships with customers. However, mission-based performance is negatively affected by the relationships’ quality with the reference territorial community. Therefore, relational capital would seem to affect only mission-based performance, and human capital influences both dimensions of corporate performance. Structural capital does not affect social cooperatives’ performance. Practical implications Some of the results in this study are particular to this research setting. It is therefore important for senior leaders of SCEs to take the results of general IC literature with a grain of salt. Whereas most of the academic literature generally supports the positive relationship of all IC sub-components (i.e. human, structural and relational capital) with performance outcomes, this is not the case in this particular study. Originality/value This is the first empirical study that has examined the linkages between IC sub-components and performance outcomes in SCEs in Italy.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1bc45c3f282fdfd509e5cb8b5ca0ec2e74f15ca0

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In Management of Technology and Innovation

1. Justin Paul
2. Parul Gupta
3. Mahadeo Prasad Jaiswal
4. Sumedha Chauhan

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. Parul Gupta
2. Mahadeo Prasad Jaiswal
3. Sumedha Chauhan
4. Justin Paul

In Strategy and Management

1. Justin Paul
2. Mahadeo Prasad Jaiswal
3. Sumedha Chauhan
4. Parul Gupta
5. Puja Khatri
6. Harshleen Kaur Duggal

Citations in the corpus

• Social entrepreneurship research: A review and future research agenda (2020, background): “In developing countries like India, institutional complexity emerges in the form of overlapping and/ or contradictory institutional logics (Bontis et al., 2018).”