Client-Related Factors and Collaboration Between Human Assets
研究了在知识密集型公司中，客户相关因素如何影响员工之间的协作决策，特别是英国律所中并购律师的协作模式，发现个人和公司层面的客户因素对协作有不同甚至相反的影响。
Collaborations between individuals in firms have important implications for the development of relational and human capital. In knowledge-intensive contexts where collaborations are formed to deliver services to clients, collaboration decisions can involve nontrivial tradeoffs between short-term and long-term benefits: individuals and firms must carefully manage the tradeoffs between leveraging existing relational and human capital for the reliable performance of repeat collaboration and creating new relational and human capital through new collaboration. Building from the premise that servicing clients is central to collaboration decisions in human asset–intensive firms, we examine how client-related factors shape collaboration decisions among lawyers (partners) in UK law firms providing M&A legal advisory services. We focus on three key client-related dimensions that we predict govern collaboration decisions: the depth of individual- and firm-level relationships with the focal client, key client attributes that reflect the client’s status and its use of different firms to undertake its outsourced work, and client-driven individual- and firm-level resource constraint. Our empirical findings support our proposition that client-related factors influence the pattern of collaborations between individuals in firms. We also reveal how client-related factors at the individual level can have opposite effects on collaboration decisions from those at the firm level. Overall, our findings contribute to research on relational capital, strategic human capital, team formation, professional service firms, and the microfoundations of strategy.