Happy Employees Make Happy Customers: The Role of Intellectual Capital in Supporting Sustainable Value Creation in Organizations

Intellectual capital has become a prominent driver of organizational and societal performance and wellbeing. However, the role of intellectual capital in the context of sustainable organizational value and wealth creation—that is, how organizations can simultaneously create customer value while also satisfying their internal stakeholders—has been virtually unexplored so far. Hence, this chapter examines the role of intellectual capital as a driver of organizational-level economic and social sustainability. It focuses on examining the effect of intellectual capital on customer value creation and the moderating role of job satisfaction in this relationship. We utilize survey data collected from 259 Finnish companies to empirically examine the research model. We find that both intellectual capital and job satisfaction are positively associated with customer value creation and that job satisfaction moderates the relationship between intra-firm relational capital and customer value creation. This shows that organizational social sustainability (measured by job satisfaction) is integrally linked with value creation in end-customer markets. Overall, our results contribute to the understanding of the role of intellectual capital as an important driver of sustainable value creation in organizations.