Francisco Morales, a professor at the School of Economics and Business Administration, states that he seeks to show how immigration redefines the strategic decisions of organizations and their competitiveness.
Francisco Morales, an academic from the School of Economics and Business Administration, investigates how organizations shape and deploy their human capital to sustain competitive advantage over time. His main interest is to unravel the mechanisms through which talent and organizational integration decisions affect the ability of firms to compete and thrive, using empirical contexts as diverse as high-performance European soccer clubs and administrative data from firms in the Chilean economy.
He is currently developing two main lines of research. The first, focused on human capital strategies and immigration, analyzes how the incorporation of immigrant workers impacts organizational performance.
In a study published in Management Scienceentitled Does Employing Skilled Immigrants Enhance Competitive Performance? and conducted together with Britta Glennon, Seth Carnahan and Exequiel Hernandez, it was shown that European clubs that hire skilled immigrants improve their performance, not only because of the individual skills they bring, but also because their presence diversifies and broadens strategic possibilities.
Along the same lines, the working paper The Unique Blend: Immigrant Talent Combinations and their Impact on Organizational Performancewith the same co-authors, explores how unique combinations of national origins make organizations less predictable and therefore more successful. For its part, the paper The Impact of Immigration on Firms' Human Capital Strategydeveloped in conjunction with Sofia FlechtnerBritta Glennon and Exequiel Hernandez, were studies the Chilean case, showing how companies adapt their hiring practices, rotation, promotions and job assignments to changes in the availability of immigrant labor. Overall, this line seeks to show how immigration, a global phenomenon in constant transformation, redefines the strategic decisions of organizations and their competitiveness.
Morales' second line of research, focused on the integration of resources and organizational design, is developed in the working paper Tight versus loose: Resource integration and organizational performanceThe film was produced with Seth Carnahan and Exequiel Hernandez. There they analyzes how the degree of interdependence and coordination among employees and units affects performance and the ability of organizations to absorb positive or negative shocks. Although the analysis is done in the context of high performance sport, its implications are relevant for any type of organization seeking to design more resilient and competitive structures.
The impact of this research agenda is projected at different levels. For the business world, it provides concrete guidance on how the composition and diversity of talent, as well as the degree of integration of resources, can affect the resilience and predictability of an organization. For the design of public policies, the findings on immigration offer evidence to promote labor integration measures that strengthen economic competitiveness, to the point that one of its articles was cited in a U.S. Senate committee. In the academic sphere, the works contribute to enriching the theory of strategic managementThe study of human capital and organizational design.
The origin of this line of work was supported by a project Fondecyt Initiation grantThis research, which has already been completed, made it possible to collect data, analyze it and present the advances at international conferences in the United States, fostering academic collaboration and the dissemination of the results. Academics participating in this research include Britta Glennon, from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; Seth Carnahan, from Washington University in St. Louis; Exequiel Hernández, also from Wharton; and Sofía Flechtner, from Universidad de los Andes, Chile.
The scholar explains that his interest was born out of a central question in strategic managementWhat are the real sources of sustainable competitive advantage? "Human capital is one of the most critical resources companies have. I'm interested in understanding how they make strategic decisions about this resource - whether it's integrating immigrant talent or designing the way their employees collaborate - and how those decisions translate into results."he says. His projection is to continue building a coherent body of knowledge on the strategic management of human capital and organizational design in an increasingly globalized and competitive world.
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