Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to further the understanding of the link between human capital and strategy across hierarchies.

Design/methodology/approach

– Using data on personality traits as a proxy for strategy implementation success, empirical data included 1,738 Operational Personality Questionnaire personality traits assessments in one large multinational firm. Respondents spanned from top-management to white-collar employees. Besides personality traits, measures include employment level and employment status. In addition, a total of 43 interviews were performed on the employee-level, with middle managers, with senior managers, and with executive-level managers.

Findings

– After a strategic shift, successful implementation of a human resource management (HRM) strategy decreased down through the hierachies. This has implications for a firm trying to realign its resources to a new strategy. If the strategic shift is large, this will pose a great problem as human capital further down in the hierarchy will not be aligned to the new strategy, but rather be aligned to the old strategy.

Research limitations/implications

– The findings are discussed using the concept of the strategic centre of gravity. The authors elaborate on the concept in terms of the origin, mass, and inertia of the strategic centre of gravity.

Practical implications

– A successful strategic shift in this sense will to a great extent depend on how successful the implementation is at lower levels of hierarchy, thus pointing to the importance to considering this when designing and pursuing strategic change.

Originality/value

– The research contributes to the HRM literature by furthering the understanding of aligning human capital on different organizational levels to strategy and by developing the concept of the strategic centre of gravity. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited