Dynamic Organisational Capabilities: a Unifying Framework for New Work Practices, Product Innovation and Competences Formation

Job, workplace and human resource management (HRM) designs are nowadays at the centre of a great attention in economic analysis. New work practices are becoming the cornerstone of an internal firm flexibility approach, which is pointed out as a significant contributor to sustainable productivity growth. In the last decade a growing economic literature has concentrated mainly on the relationship between firm organisation and performance, establishing a causal link both at the theoretical and the empirical level. Other links, like that with product innovation and competences development, have been more neglected. However recent empirical evidence is throwing new light on these latter relationships. Building on such results, we develop a framework that embeds all the main findings and shows how the dynamic organisational capabilities are progressively cumulative and endogenously created, according to a typical path-(inter)dependency process among four poles of the mentioned links. Policy implications in term of diffusion of new workplace practices are also derived.