Human Capital as Source for Sustained Competitive Advantages in SMEs: A Core Competencies Approach

Human capital is a source of competitive advantage, since it helps to build core competencies which position the company above its competitors. Core competencies are dynamic competencies of superior hierarchy, which integrate, build and reconfigure internal and external factors of business to create value. Core competencies are competitive advantages when an organization gets better performance than competitors. Human capital is source of competitive advantage but it possibly does not directly affect to performance. It needs to associate with other elements in core competencies. These associations are not well known. That is the goal of this paper: to determine how human capital affects the organizational performance through core competencies. We argue that human capital needs other intellectual capital-based elements to constitute core competencies which finally improve and yields above average performance.