FASE IV: Comunicación de Resultados

This research includes limitations that offer possibilities for future research. As the existing literature relating the relationship between firm-level creative capital and HRM is limited, an explorative, qualitative multiple case comparison study was conducted in order to derive valuable research findings. While this study design had strong theoretical reasons, it also has limitations that should be addressed in further research.

5. Discussion and Conclusion

103 First, the use of non-probability sampling does not allow for generalizations. However, this study was not aimed at generalizing the research findings but offering a foundation for further research by exploring the relationship. Therefore, the research choice and sampling method hold strong theoretical reasons. Nonetheless, further research is strongly advised to research the relationship between HRM and creative capital with a study design that allows for both generalizations and causality explanations. This means to conduct empirical, quantitative research based on a larger sample. The study is based on a sample design of eight organizations as this number allowed for insights to explore the relationships of HRM and firm-level creative capital at both low and high creative capital organizations. Nonetheless, future research should aim at providing generalizable findings and therefore include a larger sample size.

Additionally, the research findings outlined that only one company operated in a truly dynamic environment. While this case indicated support for our proposition regarding the role of the dynamism of the market, a larger sample size of organizations operating in a dynamic environment might be especially important for future research to allow investigating the issue further. This may also allow highlighting the possible moderating effect of the market environment proposed in this paper.

Another point for discussion is the possibility that some respondents gave socially desirable answers to the questions as the pre-interview document analysis indicated that nearly all companies are striving to be more innovative and hence trying to position themselves as more innovative than they actually might be. Additionally, it could be that there might have been information respondents contained due to regulative company restrictions, which might have influenced the findings of this study. As an example, one respondent said that she could not answer a question. We therefore asked if she could not answer the question because she did not know or because she was not allowed to due to company reasons. The respondent left this question open, leading to the assumption that not all information were prevailed. Consequently, the research findings are based on what one respondent decided to explain. This issue was tried to be prevented by asking non-leading, follow-up questions but it is assumable that it could not be prevented completely.

This also means that the answers might not reflect the creative capital of the entire organization but how the respondent perceived it. As an illustration, despite follow-up questions, the interviewee of organization A mainly related the questions to his tasks and experiences rather than explaining the role of other employees. Hence, the findings indicated that company A mostly uses the creative ability on a managerial level, which might be misleading and might not reflect reality. In order to prevent that interviewees only talked about themselves or certain departments, we aimed at interviewing managers with HR responsibilities that had knowledge about both innovation within the company as well as all departments, so that the interviewees could provide a broad insight into the company. However, in order to further eliminate the issues, we encourage future research to have a more specific research scope by focusing on certain departments within an organization. As an

5. Discussion and Conclusion

104 example, future research might particularly focus on interviewing line managers of the same department within different organizations, e.g. developing a sample of production managers. Additionally, it is recommended to interview more respondents within the chosen department in order to assess if the intended creative ability and relationships of organizations are in line with how employees perceive it, hence making use of triangulation. This could be of high importance as the management of an organization could have various practices in place to motivate employees’, indicating high organizational creative ability. However, organizational creative ability is not just about motivating employees with formal procedures but also the enactment of the creativity, meaning the active use to integrate the creativity of the employees into something valuable. Consequently, it could be of value to also conduct research on the work floor to investigate how employees perceive the organizational creative ability and if their creativity is actually actively used by the organization. A further possibility to prevent this could also be by employing a study design based on observation. Additionally, a longitudinal study design could also be of value as it allows investigating how changes in the organization and the environment influence the creative capital of an organization.

Moreover, future research should also extend this study by conducting research within organizations that are more comparable in terms of size. The eight case organizations of this study range in terms of employees from 40 to 1800 employees. These size differences therefore limit the generalizbility. However, as mentioned this study was not aimed at generalizing but exploring the relationship of external labor and firm-level creative capital for medium to large organizations. Additionally, the findings show that high creative capital was visible for both smaller and larger organizations. As an example, company B and company F have 40 and 60 employees respectively while company C has 1800 employees. Despite the differences in size, both company B and company F have high firm-level creative capital, while company C has medium-high firm-level creative capital. In turn, company D and company E have 140 and 40 employees respectively and have low firm-level creative capital. These findings therefore indicate that the company size does not influence the creative capital to a large extent. Nonetheless, literature suggests that the firm size could influence the creative capital of an organization. Alvarez and Barney (2001) found support that large firms have the advantage of a wider accessibility to new technologies, talent and innovative capabilities as they have stronger resources and capabilities. However, smaller, more entrepreneurial firms have the flexibility to have a stronger focus on developing new, innovative technologies and concepts but might be lacking the resources to develop these into a competitive product. This indicates that the characteristics of firm-level creative capital might differ between small and large companies. As example, a small entrepreneurial company might have strong organizational creative abilities and high individual creativity, leading to high firm-level creative capital, while a large firm might have a wide network with loose relationships, which might also lead to high firm-level creative capital. Future research therefore should focus on exploring differences in firm-level creative capital characteristic of small

5. Discussion and Conclusion

105 versus large companies. Consequently, a larger sample of companies that are more comparable in size may lead to more detailed, valuable findings.

Lastly, in order to build a foundation for future research we explored the relationship between HRM and creative capital. However, as mentioned we were not focused on the proposed outcome variable of firm-level creative capital, which is innovation. While we explored high-firm level creative capital for both organizations focused on exploration and organizations focused on exploitation, as well as both product innovation and process innovation, we still recommend for future research to focus on the relationship between firm-level creative capital and innovation of organizations. This will allow to further explore how firm-level creative capital impacts different forms of innovation and lead to conclusions on this topic.