Intellectual capital, individual performance and perceived corporate strategy. An exploratory study

Intellectual capital (IC) management represents a topic that, in recent years, gathered considerable importance in the strategic management as well as in the knowledge management and in the management accounting fields. Both academic and practitioner literatures describe the implementation of IC management systems prevalently in industrial contexts in northern Europe, and address the IC theme empirically usually adopting an inter-organizational perspective. The aim of this paper consists in the presentation of the development of an IC accounting system within an Italian Industrial Group that is a leader in the agricultural food product sector. The research questions posed by the present study are two: 1) in what way does IC create value for the corporate reality under analysis? and 2) which of the firm’s strategic policies have a positive impact on the creation of IC? Based on the data gathered by means of two surveys on all the company employees (the sample consists of 1,117 observations) the results suggest that: 1) IC positively affects the performance of individual employees; 2) human capital and relational capital positively affect individual performance through the mediating role of the structural capital dimension; 3) IC has a leverage effect in improving the effectiveness of firm’s strategic policies in relation to the employees performance.