Interaction between structural capital and human capital in Italian NPOs: Leadership, organizational culture and human resource management

Abstract

Purpose

This explorative research aims at examining the relationship between human capital and structural capital in Italian NPOs, focusing on senior managers.

Design/methodology/approach

Administration of a semi‐structured interview to 122 senior managers of the same number of Italian NPOs. Interviews have been analyzed using different techniques: content analysis, run through the software T‐Lab (analysis of word occurrence and co‐word mapping, analysis of Markovian sequences), as well as discourse analysis carried out by two independent judges.

Findings

Italian NPOs' organizational culture is action‐oriented and self‐referral, not knowledge‐oriented. Training is not considered as a tool for strategic management of HR. Senior managers are mainly self‐taught and lack adequate competence on HR management. Organizational culture does not help the development of human capital as it neither uses structured procedures to select the best candidates, nor develops a training programme based on the organizational specific needs.

Research limitations/implications

The group approached is a convenience sample, not a statistical representative sample.

Practical implications

The paper suggests that intellectual capital can be an effective tool to address Italian NPOs' self‐referential knowledge and overcome their gaps in strategic management of human resources.

Originality/value

NPOs' senior manager training has rarely been addressed; in addition, the adopted methodology triangulates different qualitative techniques of analysis.

Citation

Benevene, P. and Cortini, M. (2010), "Interaction between structural capital and human capital in Italian NPOs: Leadership, organizational culture and human resource management", Journal of Intellectual Capital, Vol. 11 No. 2, pp. 123-139. https://doi.org/10.1108/14691931011039642