The definition and measurement of human capital resources: A content and meta-analytic review
Citation. Zhang, L., Van Iddekinge, C. H., Ployhart, R. E., Arnold, J. D., & Jordan, S. L. (2023). The definition and measurement of human capital resources: A content and meta-analytic review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 108(9), 1486–1514. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001088
Summary. Zhang and colleagues review how human capital resources (HCR) have been defined and measured, then meta-analytically test whether measurement quality changes HCR–performance relations. Across three studies, they find that HCR is usually treated as a collective resource grounded in employees’ KSAOs, but existing measures are often construct-deficient, construct-contaminated, or both. The article is useful for the wiki because it shows that organizational-level claims about human capability depend on clean construct boundaries before those claims can be connected to performance, strategy, or AI-era measures of human and machine capability.
Key claims
- In a review of HCR definitions (k = 84), most definitions emphasized collective knowledge, skills, and abilities; more recent definitions also tended to include other characteristics such as personality.
- In a content analysis of HCR measures (k = 127), only 23.6% of measures focused solely on HCR, 46.5% assessed both HCR and non-HCR constructs, and 29.9% assessed only non-HCR constructs.
- HCR measures were often deficient because they assessed only one or two dimensions of the construct domain rather than the broader set of knowledge, skills, abilities, other characteristics, and compound KSAOs.
- HCR measures that were less deficient showed stronger criterion-related validity for predicting unit and firm performance.
- Partially contaminated HCR measures were somewhat more predictive than uncontaminated measures (ρ = .35 vs. .25), mainly because they included other performance-relevant constructs; this creates a practical validity temptation but weakens inference about HCR itself.
- Fully contaminated measures showed weaker validity than measures that captured HCR content, reinforcing that broad labels such as human capital can become misleading when operationalized with antecedents, practices, attitudes, expenses, or outcomes rather than the target construct.
Evidence & limitations
- The paper combines a systematic review of definitions, a content analysis of measures, and meta-analysis of HCR–performance correlations; its strongest contribution is measurement discipline rather than a new theory of how HCR develops.
- The review treats HCR as a collective unit- or firm-level resource emerging from employees’ KSAOs, so it is most relevant to organizational capability measurement rather than individual human-capital economics.
- The criterion-related validity results are based on published HCR–performance studies, so estimates inherit the measurement choices, research designs, and publication patterns of the underlying literature.
- The finding that partially contaminated measures predict performance more strongly should not be read as permission to use contaminated measures when the inference target is HCR; it shows that mixed constructs can improve prediction while obscuring what is actually producing the relationship.