Valuable, Inimitable Skills Drive Sustainable Manufacturing Success, Study Finds

In the crowded industrial corridors of Dhaka and Gazipur, where Bangladesh’s garment, textile, and light-engineering factories churn out products for global markets, a quiet revolution in management thinking is underway. A new study published in Discover Sustainability suggests that the secret to sustainable manufacturing performance may lie not in machinery, capital, or even technology, but in the specific qualities of a company’s human resources. Researchers led by Md Mamun Mia of Daffodil International University surveyed 274 human resource managers and senior HR professionals across manufacturing firms in the two districts, and their findings offer a statistically grounded answer to a question that has long intrigued organizational scientists: which kinds of people-related resources actually translate into competitive advantage, and does that advantage genuinely push companies toward more sustainable performance?

The study is anchored in one of the most influential theories of modern strategic management, the resource-based view. First articulated in the 1980s and 1990s, the resource-based view holds that firms win not because of their position in a market, but because of what they possess internally. According to the theory, a resource confers sustained competitive advantage only if it satisfies four criteria, often abbreviated as VRIN: it must be valuable, meaning it helps the firm exploit opportunities or neutralize threats; rare, meaning few competitors have it; inimitable, meaning rivals cannot easily copy it; and non-substitutable, meaning there is no equivalent alternative that delivers the same benefit. Human capital, the argument goes, is uniquely suited to meet these tests. Skills, tacit knowledge, organizational culture, and employee commitment are notoriously difficult for competitors to replicate, unlike machines that can be purchased on the open market.

What makes the new research distinctive is that it tests all four VRIN dimensions simultaneously in a single statistical model, applied to a developing economy that has received comparatively little empirical attention. The authors note that while human capital is increasingly recognized as a strategic driver of sustainable industrial performance, evidence on how VRIN-consistent human resource attributes translate into competitive advantage and sustainable performance in developing economies remains sparse. Bangladesh, one of the world’s largest garment exporters and a country whose industrial growth is directly relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 9 on industry, innovation, and infrastructure, provides an ideal testing ground. The study’s theoretical premise is that strategic human resource management practices, such as selective hiring, training, and performance-linked rewards, are the mechanisms through which VRIN-consistent resources are expected to emerge in the first place.

Methodologically, the researchers employed a quantitative survey design, collecting responses from HR managers and senior HR professionals in manufacturing companies located in the Dhaka and Gazipur districts. The data were analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling, or PLS-SEM, a statistical technique widely used in management research because it can estimate multiple relationships between latent constructs, variables that cannot be directly observed, such as resource value or competitive advantage, at the same time. PLS-SEM works by modeling each latent construct through its survey indicators and then estimating path coefficients, standardized values between roughly minus one and one that indicate the strength and direction of the relationship between constructs. The analysis was carried out with the software SmartPLS, and the significance of each path was evaluated against bootstrap confidence intervals, a resampling procedure that estimates how stable the coefficients would be if the survey were repeated many times.

The results are striking in their hierarchy. By far the most powerful positive contributor to competitive advantage was resource value, with a path coefficient of 0.499, meaning that when employees possess capabilities that genuinely help the firm compete, the effect on advantage dwarfs every other factor measured. Non-substitutability came second at 0.169, followed by inimitability at 0.121. In plain terms, the study suggests that it matters far more that your workforce’s skills are useful than that they are merely hard to copy. A firm can have idiosyncratic, deeply embedded practices that no rival can imitate, but if those practices do not create value for customers or operations, they contribute little to competitive standing. This ordering offers a practical lesson for managers in emerging markets: invest first in making human capabilities genuinely valuable to the business, and only then worry about protecting and differentiating them.

The study also examined whether competitive advantage feeds into sustainable performance, a construct encompassing the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of a firm’s operations. Here the answer was affirmative but more modest: sustainable performance was positively correlated with competitive advantage, with a path coefficient of 0.224. The finding supports a chain-of-effects logic that underlies much of the strategic human resource management literature. Well-managed human resources create advantages in cost, quality, innovation, and reputation; those advantages, in turn, give firms the slack and the incentive to invest in cleaner technologies, safer workplaces, and more durable business models. For a manufacturing sector under intense pressure from international buyers to meet environmental and labor standards, this link between internal capability and sustainability outcomes carries real weight.

Not every hypothesis survived the statistical scrutiny, and the authors are refreshingly candid about it. The study hypothesized that resource rarity would moderate, that is, change the strength of, the relationship between competitive advantage and sustainable performance, a proposition drawn from the idea that rare resources might act as a boundary condition on how advantage converts into outcomes. The point estimate for this moderating effect was negative, at minus 0.384, but it failed to achieve significance when evaluated against its 95 percent bootstrap confidence interval, and its effect size, measured by the statistic f-squared, was a negligible 0.002. The researchers explicitly frame this as an exploratory pattern for future research rather than a confirmed finding about resource rigidity. In other words, the data do not show that rarity harms sustainability; they simply show no reliable evidence that rarity changes the advantage-performance link in this sample.

The implications ripple outward in several directions. For scholars, the study is described as one of the first PLS-SEM investigations to integrate all four VRIN dimensions in a single model of Bangladesh’s manufacturing industry, treating valuable, inimitable, and non-substitutable resources as direct antecedents of competitive advantage while positioning rarity as a potential boundary condition on the advantage-to-performance pathway. For practitioners, the message is that strategic human resource management is not an administrative afterthought but a core engine of industrial competitiveness. Recruitment systems that identify genuinely valuable capabilities, training programs that build skills competitors cannot easily replicate, and retention practices that keep those capabilities in-house are, according to this evidence, direct investments in a firm’s sustainable future. For policymakers pursuing SDG 9, the research suggests that upgrading a nation’s industrial base may depend as much on human capital policy as on infrastructure spending.

The study also carries a caution about generalization. Its sample of 274 HR professionals was drawn from a single country and concentrated in two industrial districts, and the respondents were, by design, people whose professional identity may predispose them to view human resources favorably. Cross-sectional survey data, collected at one point in time, can establish correlation and model-consistent pathways but cannot definitively prove causation. The authors themselves acknowledge that the rarity moderation result should be treated as exploratory, and they position their work as a foundation for further inquiry rather than a final verdict. Still, the research was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Daffodil International University, informed consent was obtained from all respondents, and the analysis was published open access, allowing researchers across the developing world to scrutinize and build upon the methods.

What lingers after reading the study is a deceptively simple reframing of an old debate. For decades, managers in cost-sensitive manufacturing hubs have treated labor as an expense to be minimized, something to be optimized through wage control and turnover management. This research, grounded in rigorous structural equation modeling of real firms, argues the opposite: the attributes of human resources, their value above all, but also their uniqueness and irreplaceability, are measurable predictors of competitive advantage, and competitive advantage is a measurable predictor of sustainable performance. In an era when factories face simultaneous demands for productivity, decarbonization, and decent work, the finding that people-centered resources drive all three at once may prove to be one of the most consequential management insights to emerge from the Global South in years. The factories of Dhaka and Gazipur, it turns out, may be teaching the world a lesson about where competitive advantage truly lives.

Subject of Research: The role of VRIN human resource attributes and strategic HRM in achieving sustainable manufacturing performance in Bangladesh

Article Title: Strategic human resource management and resource value attributes for sustainable manufacturing performance

Article References: Mia, M. M., Showrav, D. G. Y., Ahmed, S. F., Khan, S., Miah, M. S., Singh, J. S. K., Tanchi, K. R., Al Amin, S., Islam, M. R., & Mansour, A. W. (2026). Strategic human resource management and resource value attributes for sustainable manufacturing performance. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04840-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04840-z

Keywords: strategic human resource management, resource-based view, VRIN resources, competitive advantage, sustainable performance, manufacturing, Bangladesh, PLS-SEM, human capital, SDG 9, developing economies, Strategic