Human Capital Measurement, Ambiguity, and Opportunism: Actors Between Menace and Opportunity**

Zusammenfassung

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nder the growing influence of economic normative thoughts (as for example the spread of shareholder value philosophy in the 1990s) and therefore under pressure to justify themselves, human resource management professionals are searching for concepts to measure the effects of their decisions and activities on business objectives. Especially, the concepts of human capital measurement attract far-reaching attention. However, that performance measurement of human resource management faces considerable methodical problems leading to the distinctive ambiguity of human capital information. In the face of this ambiguity, the paper points out that human capital measurement tends to promote opportunistic patterns of behavior by offering opportunities to evade personal responsibility.

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Human Capital Measurement, Ambiguity, and Opportunism: Actors Between Menace and Opportunity**

1. Introduction

In the last two decades, human resource management became under pressure to ensure its economic legitimation. After a long period of progressive institutionalization and centralization of the personnel function in German companies, personnel departments had to conform to demands on less bureaucracy and rationalization in the 1980s (Krulis-Randa 1994, 189; Scherni 2004, 66; Wunderer 1992). In the 1990s, shareholder value management spread over Europe. From this shareholder value perspective, the primary companies' goal is to create shareholder value by ensuring its owners a higher financial return than they can get elsewhere. So, every business activity in a company has to prove its impact on shareholder value (Scherm/Pietsch 2005, 44-45). Accordingly, human resource management professionals look for concepts to identify their own contributions to business success, too. For that purpose, human resource management needs to take reference to some objectified methods measuring its effects on (financial) business success (Bahnmüller/Fisecker o. J., 70; Eigler 1999, 232). On that background, human resource professionals pay attention to performance measurement methods and especially to value-based concepts (e.g., DGFP 2004; Weinberg 2004, 15).

The discussion about the concepts of human capital measurement takes place controversially. Management consultants as well as many business professionals associate great expectations with the methods of human capital measurement. But simultaneously, there are critical voices which emphasize significant methodical deficits (e.g., Bahnmüller/Fisecker o. J., 71; Eigler 1999; Gert2 2004; Wolf/Zwick 2003). This technical discussion is important because it clarifies methodical limitations of human capital measurement. In the face of those methodical limitations, the resulting human capital information proves to be ambiguous and difficult to interpret. The difficulties in interpreting human capital information arouse consequences for the behavior of involved actors. As for example, the deduction of concrete managerial consequences from human capital information is complicated. Not least, this gets intensified by conflicting interests of involved actors.

On this background, it is the aim of the paper to contribute to the understanding of behavioral consequences of human capital measurement coming from the ambiguity and multifaceted interpretability of generated information. Especially, it shall be shown that the ambiguity of human capital information can promote opportunistic interpretation. Moreover, some clues for the limitation of those opportunistic interpretation strategies shall be given.

For that purpose, basic properties of (value based) human capital measurement will be sketched, initially. In these remarks, the focus lies on "value based" human capital measurement because the underlying shareholder value perspective makes a great deal of the ...

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