Getting people involved: The benefit of intellectual capital management for addressing HR challenges

This paper aims to explore the benefits of intellectual capital assessment for facing current challenges of human resources work and organizational development.

The paper takes findings of studies on challenges in HR work and maps them with features of intellectual capital assessment methods. It is thus a theoretical paper, based on practical experience, and findings of practice‐oriented studies. It can serve as the basis for formulating new hypotheses to be further investigated and discussed.

There is a considerable overlap of HR challenges and potential benefits of IC assessment in several areas of human resources' work, closely interlinked with organizational development.

The findings of this paper may stimulate research on organizations as social systems and in applied research on human resources. It provides a starting point for further investigation of psychological, social and organisational success factors and to the practical challenge of building intelligent and sustainable organisations in a continuously changing environment.

Using participatory IC assessment approaches may change practices in HR work and enrich the portfolio of methods used and enlarge the application of IC assessment.

The paper fosters the value of expertise and experience of people in organizations. This may lead, in the long run, to changes in organizational cultures.

In research and practice, IC assessment and HR work are mostly disconnected. This paper proposes to establish a link and explore synergies. This may have considerable impact on research and practice in these areas.