The human capital impact on the shareholder value creation

Theories supporting the relationship between employee development and responsibility and productivity improvement, and employee satisfaction and financial performances now have more importance, but this is not all: the impact of the most advanced ways for managing people enable companies to achieve very positive long terms results. This can confirm that people managing practices need to be integrated in workplaces to obtain real advantages such as greater productivity and, as a consequence, greater shareholder value creation (Rappaport, 2006). Undoubtedly a calibrated grade of turnover, a correct allocation of financial resources for internal training, and appropriate methods of incentive and recruiting contribute to value creation. Our research starts with the valuation of financial results for the best companies to work for, in terms of shareholder value creation. The Great Place to Work Institute conducted the most extensive employee survey in corporate America in order to choose the “100 Best Companies to Work for” (more than 105,000 employees from 446 companies responded to a 57-question survey). As we aim to prove, companies giving greater attention to the working conditions of their own workforce not only make people working inside more faithful and involved, but also handle a strategic lever able to create value for shareholders. In the first part of the paper (M. Pellicelli) we shall present the shareholder value theory and the principal corporate value measures usually used to communicate value to investors of the largest corporations. In particular we will analyse the significant results obtained by a sample of the “100 Best Companies to Work for” in terms of market value added and total shareholder return. In the second part of the paper (C. Casalegno) we will present the human resource theory and analyse the principal factors adopted by the “100 Best Companies to Work for” that have obtained the best shareholder value results.