What Enables Human Capital Investment Sharing in Elite Sport?

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Overall, I have to say that this is an interesting paper which could provide an insightful analysis into human capital theory. As such, I do have a number of concerns and questions which I have outlined below.

 

My first concern deals with the research question which should better explained in the title of the paper and in the abstract. It should be noted that your strategic analysis focuses on process, and not on strategic content (Hermann, 2005; Schendel, 1992). This means that it is not the effect of the decision (sharing the investment in human capital) on the organisational performance that is analysed, but the conditions that led to the decision. Another methodological framework would have been necessary to provide a content analysis.

 

 

My second and main concern has to do with the theoretical framework, which lies on three subsections.

The Human capital theory subsection is interesting to the current topic of the paper. I have nothing to say about the first part about this subsection. But the second one dealing with the Resource-Based Viev (RBV) and competitive advantage should also take into account some papers from the Knowledge-Based View (KBV). Indeed, one link between human capital theory and RBV is KBV. More specifically, nothing is said about the role of tacit knowledge which is a human capital asset, specific to the organization (except in the case of lift out, Groysberg et al., 2008). Because tacit knowledge is VRIN (Barney, 1991), it is important in the link between human capital and performance, especially in sports:

Berman, S., Down, J., & Hill, C. (2002). Tacit Knowledge as a Source of Competitive Advantage in the National Basketball Association. Academy of Management Journal, 45(1), 13-31.

Harris, C. M., McMahan, G. C., & Wright, P. M. (2012). Talent and time together: The impact of human capital and tenure overlap on unit performance. Personnel Review, 41, 408-427.

Lechner, C., & Gudmundsson, V. (2012). Creating superior value in sports teams: Resources and managerial experience. M@n@gement, 15(3), 283-312.

Smart, D., & Wolfe, R. (2000). Examining sustainable competitive advantage in intercollegiate athletics: a resource-based view. Journal of Sport Management, 14, 133-153.

Tacit knowledge seems to be very important in the context of your paper because having all the players in the same club represents a very important advantage for the national teams.

 

I don’t see the point of the Human capital in sport subsection. Many references from the previous subsection already deal with sport (e.g., (18), (21), (22)). Sport is often used as a laboratory to test theories, as the author(s) suggests: 'Sport has served as a valuable context for examining human capital theory'. So is it useful to make it a separate section? This subsection would be more interesting if it raises the peculiarities of the sporting industry which is used in the discussion (p. 11, first paragraph).

 

My main concern about this paper deals with the Human capital investment sharing subsection. The authors explain that: ‘there has been less attention on how organizations might share human capital investment’ (I think your research question is much more about why organizations share than how they do it). Therefore, this section is based on very few references. You need to broaden the theoretical framework by looking at the relationships between organizations. I see two useful theoretical frameworks on the subject.

The first one is coopetition (Brandenburger & Nalebuff, 1995). Certain conditions have been identified that explain the choice of organizations to start coopetition relationships, such as the degree of resource interdependence (Dagnino & Gnyawali, 2009) or the ability to pool resources (Czakon, 2018). Thus, it appears that this choice is highly contingent (Feuillet et al., 2021).

The second one is the relational view (Dyer & Singh, 1998). This theory explains that a competitive advantage could be create thanks to the relationships between organizations. The advantages could come from the complementary value of the resources (Mahoney & Pandian, 1992; this is one of your findings!), learning partnership (Dyer & Singh, 1998)…

One of those theories (or another one) could be helpful to build your theoretical framework and to avoid starting with an almost completely blank grid dealing about interorganizational cooperation.

 

I also have a general comment for the theoretical framework section: most of the references are quite old. The authors should quote more recent papers.

 

The Materials and Methods section seems good. Nevertheless, more details are necessary on the interviews. What is the average duration of the interviews? This is a just an example. You should also further described the interview grids (or only the themes addressed if there are too many grids). For example, the readers need to know what the questions are dealing with partnerships in place (the reasons of starting this partnership the real effects of the partnership, the blocking points...).

 

The findings and the discussion are interesting but should be revisited based on the new theoretical framework. For example, what are the differences between your complementary value condition and what Mahoney & Pandian (1992) described 20 years ago?

I really like your analogy with the association loan market. See Feuillet et al. (2021) to go further on that topic and the contingency of this strategic choice (especially if you decide to use the coopetition framework to better analyze the interorganizational relationships).

I would also like a discussion about the project (still under discussion) to add a Chinese volleyball team in the French championship: (https://california18.com/the-chinese-volleyball-team-wants-to-join-the-french-championship-an-exceptional-chanceaccording-to-the-president-of-the-league/5587662022/amp/. Some of the four conditions you described are not fulfilled (for example, the link between the professional league and the French federation that also want to win Olympic medals). Could your findings explain why the project is likely to fail?

 

You should also add a conclusion section.

 

It is - all in all - an interesting paper. While there is quality in the empirical analysis, the writing, theorization, and arguments that go along with it are no sufficient. Authors must sharp their argument about their theoretical framework in order to make it a publishable paper.

 

Minor comments:

P. 4, l. 153: the right reference seems to be (31).

P. 11, l. 518: the reference (50) does not seem to deal with loans in football.

 

Additional references:

Brandenburger, A. M., & Nalebuff, B. J. (1995). The right game: Use game theory to shape strategy (Vol. 76, pp. 57-71). Chicago: Harvard Business Review.

Czakon, W. (2018). Network coopetition. In A. S. Fernandez, P. Chiambaretto, F. Le Roy, & W. Czakon (Eds.), The Routledge companion to coopetition strategies (pp. 47–57). Routledge.

Dagnino, G., & Gnyawali, D. (2009). Coopetition strategy: Current issues and future research directions. Reading, PA: Academy of Management, Chicago.

Dyer, J. H., & Singh, H. (1998). The relational view: Cooperative strategy and sources of interorganizational competitive advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23(4), 660-679.

Groysberg, B., Lee, L. E., & Nanda, A. (2008). Can they take it with them? The portability of star knowledge workers' performance. Management Science, 54(7), 1213-1230.

Feuillet, A., Terrien, M., Scelles, N., & Durand, C. (2021). Determinants of coopetition and contingency of strategic choices: The case of professional football clubs in France. European Sport Management Quarterly, 21(5), 748-763.

Herrmann, P. (2005). Evolution of strategic management: The need for new dominant designs. International Journal of management reviews, 7(2), 111-130.

Mahoney, J. T., & Pandian, J. R. (1992). The resource‐based view within the conversation of strategic management. Strategic Management Journal, 13(5), 363-380.

Schendel, D. (1992). Introduction to the summer 1992 special issue on'strategy process research'. Strategic Management Journal, 1-4.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Authors notice that sport research has been at the forefront of theoretical developments related to human capital. Organizations are increasingly cooperating around elite athlete development, which is a type of human capital investment.

Complementary value of the authors.

Example: KKS isa connection between the hockey players and the hockey market.

1. It can help the country find enough talent players. 2. It is playing in Russia and Canada, therefore, many players can play in a higher platform.

When human capital has complementary value, sharing investment can be more effective than acting independently because the benefits accruing to sharing organizations increase rather than decrease.

 

 

Author Response

Thank you for identifying the contributions of our study. 

In your report, you noted that we could improve the "arguments and discussion of the findings" and "the presentation of the results." 

We have made substantial changes to the manuscript that we believe improve these areas. Specifically, we have added substantial new content to the theoretical framework and discussion. The changes to the document have been highlighted using blue text.

 

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I would like to commend the authors for their work in improving this paper. The authors addressed my main concerns and comments. Therefore, I recommend the publication of this paper in this present form.