A Service Perspective for Human Capital Resources: A Critical Base for Strategy Implementation

Abstract

Although strategy formulation has received the lion's share of attention in strategic management research, strategy implementation is widely considered to provide the greatest challenges for top executives. Observers have cited the need for more research on implementation, and thought leaders have called for the use of interdisciplinary approaches. Thus, we explore strategy implementation from the perspective of relational capital and human capital resources (in which relationships are especially important) and the development, bundling, and deployment of these resources to create strategic capabilities. Our discussion of implementation is unique in that we explain how it can be improved when guided by service-dominant logic (SDL) from the marketing field. We show how the emphasis of SDL on the exchange of service (rather than transactional interactions) and the manifestations of a service perspective such as enduring relationships, collaboration, co-creation, open dialogue, trust, and status minimization can facilitate the bundling and deployment of human capital resources for effective strategy implementation. We explain how SDL can facilitate implementation in the context of interdependencies, business ecosystems, and interactions across organizational boundaries. We provide both propositions and suggestions for future research.