Employees on the rebound: Extending the careers literature to include boomerang employment.

Abstract

As employee careers have evolved from linear trajectories confined within 1 organization to more dynamic and boundaryless paths, organizations and individuals alike have increasingly considered reestablishing prior employment relationships. These "boomerang employees" follow career paths that feature 2 or more temporally separated tenures in particular organizations ("boomerang organizations"). Yet, research to date is mute on how or to what extent differences across boomerang employees' career experiences, and the learning and knowledge developed at and away from boomerang organizations, meaningfully impact their performance following their return. Addressing this omission, we extend a careers-based learning perspective to construct a theoretical framework of a parsimonious, yet generalizable, set of factors that influence boomerang employee return performance. Results based on a sample of boomerang employees and employers in the same industry (professional basketball) indicate that intra- and extraorganizational knowledge construction and disruptions, as well as transition events, are significantly predictive of boomerangs' return performance. Comparisons with 2 matched samples of nonboomerang employees likewise suggest distinctive patterns in the performance of boomerang employees. (PsycINFO Database Record

Hello again: Managing talent with boomerang employees

“…Ostensibly, boomerangs are rehired by the organization due to superior performance during their initial stint. Indeed, Swider et al (2017) report that a boomerang's initial performance at a focal firm is a primary driver of their performance as a boomerang. This is because an individual's self‐efficacy and performance can be attributed to their prior success in similar experiences (Dokko, Wilk, & Rothbard, 2009; Qui ñ ones, Ford, & Teachout, 1995; Swider et al, 2017).…”

“…First, given their understanding of the organization they are (re)joining, boomerang employees could mitigate some of the costs of information asymmetries and time investment required to recruit and socialize other external talent (Bidwell, 2011). Second, boomerangs have been shown to be better performers when they gained practical experience in the interim firm (Swider, Liu, Harris, & Gardner, 2017), and outperformed other external hires when they were placed in roles that involve relational demands and administrative coordination (Keller, Kehoe, Bidwell, Collings, & Myer, in press). Third, boomerangs bring knowledge and networks from interim employment, which should give them an advantage over internal hires (Bruque, Moyano, & Piccolo, 2016), although enhanced performance compared to internal hires has not yet been found in other samples of boomerangs (Arnold, Van Iddekinge, Campion, Bauer, & Campion, in press; Swider et al, 2017).…”

“…Third, we build on the theoretical talent management model presented by Collings and Mellahi (2009) by suggesting that the boomerangs' ability to rebuild their psychological contract may explain why different groups within the labor pool (i.e., stayers and boomerangs) report different outcomes. Finally, we expand on the model of boomerang performance (Arnold et al, in press; Keller et al, in press; Swider et al, 2017) to identify other benefits that accrue to boomerang employees such as increased compensation, enhanced job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and greater time spent on extra‐role behaviors.…”

A Fitting Approach to Construct and Measurement Alignment

“…Alternatively, in a retrospective field design, Morgeson (2005) had team leaders describe previous novel and disruptive events and then asked team members to report on how their leader and team handled those very events. Also, Swider, Liu, Harris, and Gardner (2017) explored the implications of rehiring former employees by comparing performances at boomerang employees’ key transition events (i.e., initial departure from an organization and return to the organization he or she left). In short, certain periods within an ongoing stream of behavior, akin to particular scenes in a movie, provide especially vivid opportunities to examine dynamics.…”

The Role of Interacting Diversities and the Location of Faultlines in Inter-Organizational Teams

“…We therefore theorize that organizational diversity in inter-organizational teams becomes a liability when the team members are diverse on additional attributes, and that performance effects of resulting diversity faultlines are contingent upon their location within the team. By following recent studies in the organizational behavior literature (e.g., Hill, Aime, & Ridge, 2017;Stuart, 2017;Swider, Liu, Harris, & Gardner, 2017), we test our theorizing with archival sports data from male national soccer teams. With our study, we contribute to the literature by answering calls for research on the conditions under which faultlines may yield desirable consequences (e.g., Rupert, Blomme, Dragt, & Jehn, 2016;Thatcher & Patel, 2012).…”