Individual Knowledge as a Bridge between Human and Customer Capital

This paper will study the influence of three components of human capital focusing on operative personnel under a dynamic perspective. It considers learning flows and the knowledge stocks that the employees of the organization generate because of the relationships that they maintain with their clients. The influence of individual knowledge in these learning flows will be examined. These being components such as: learning capacities; automatic and conscious knowledge, on the flows of the relational learning process including transfer, transformation and harvesting phases of knowledge. In order to study the relative importance of the individual knowledge components in each phase of the relational process, the scale established by [Kohli and Jaworski 1990] will be used in this research. The paper is structured in four parts. In the first, a theoretical reference on individual knowledge on the relational learning process will be established. In the second part, some hypothesis and the necessary methodology will be proposed. In the third part the results will be shown and finally, in the conclusions some interesting aspects on the role of individual knowledge in the process described will be shown. Conclusions are based on a study of eighty-four organizations. This investigation establishes important conclusions on the role of individual knowledge in the generation of the customer capital. Concretely, the explicit knowledge of the employees is the most meaningful in the relational learning process, although it is also true that the tacit knowledge and individual learning capacities have a special importance in the harvesting phase of knowledge.