Relational Capital and Appropriate Incentives: A Recipe for Human Resource Sustainability?

This paper attempts to give some hints for human resources management that are founded on a motivation-based economic analysis of incentives and the idea of relational capital. It is argued that cross-fertilization between traditional economic literature on incentives, experimental economics and research in cognitive psychology can provide useful insights on how best to design incentives schemes in firms. This analysis promotes a diffused style of leadership which could render human resources development more sustainable while the traditional hierarchical one is losing grasp with reality.