Who Leaves, Where to, and Why Worry? Employee Mobility, Employee Entrepreneurship, and Effects on Source Firm Performance

The dynamic capability view (DCV) of the firm has become one of the leading frameworks aimed at identifying drivers of long-term firm survival and growth. Yet, despite considerable academic interest, there are many questions about what dynamic capabilities are, how they relate to other organizational operations, and how they relate to firm performance. In this art, we provide a unique and comprehensive examination of the DCV literature that goes beyond past reviews by combining text based analysis with surveys of, and interviews with, researchers in the field. With this approach, we are able to examine the evolution of the DCV in written literature and identify missing research themes. Based on this review, we argue that future research will benefit from integrating the DCV with configuration theory and recent microfoundational thinking. We encapsulate this discussion via an architectural model of the DCV (entitled 'House of Dynamic Capabilities') that combines microfoundations underlying DCs at the varying levels of analysis (individual, business unit, and organizational) while also accounting for important enablers of DCs and firm strategic orientation. We also show how this logic requires a completely different set of methodological approaches to those currently in use.

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“…601)." Some attempts exist to translate individual and aggregate effects of turnover on organizational performance (Campbell et al, 2012).…”

Section: Performancementioning

confidence: 99%

The Architecture of Dynamic Capability Research Identifying the Building Blocks of a Configurational Approach

Wilden

Devinney

Dowling

2016

The Academy of Management Annals

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“…Yet the literature is full of studies that document extensive mobility between similar jobs within the same industry (e.g. Campbell et al 2012;Dokko and Rosenkopf 2010;Groysberg 2010;Mollick 2012). Although firms might prefer to fill jobs internally, they often lack a suitable internal candidate.…”

Section: Compensation: Paying People To Movementioning

confidence: 99%

Shifts and Ladders: Comparing the Role of Internal and External Mobility in Managerial Careers

Bidwell

Mollick

2015

Organization Science

109

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Employees can build their careers either by moving into a new job within their current organization or else by moving to a different organization. We use matching perspectives on job mobility to develop predictions about the different roles that those internal and external moves will play within careers. Using data on the careers of master of business administration alumni, we show how internal and external mobility are associated with very different rewards: upward progression into a job with greater responsibilities is much more likely to happen through internal mobility than external mobility; yet despite this difference, external moves offer similar increases in pay to internal, as employers seek to attract external hires. Consistent with our arguments, we also show that the pay increases associated with external moves are lower when the moves take place for reasons other than career advancement, such as following a layoff or when moving into a different kind of work. Despite growing interest in boundaryless careers, our findings indicate that internal and external mobility play very different roles in executives' careers, with upward mobility still happening overwhelmingly within organizations.

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“…A study in the U.S. National Football League showed, for example, that by losing employees that transferred key routines to another team, the focal organization became less competitive against the acquiring one (Aime, Johnson, Ridge, & Hill, 2010). In several other studies, spanning the U.S. legal services industry (Campbell, Ganco, Franco, & Agarwal, 2012;Phillips, 2002) and the Dutch auditing industry (Wezel et al, 2006), these competitive effects were so strong as to increase the likelihood of dissolution of the source firm, and this result was found to be especially so when employees move together, to a close rival, or to found a new firm (which highlights the important contingent effects surrounding mobility that we review below).…”

Section: Organizational Impacts Of Employee Mobilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the other hand, some institutional norms may specifically protect the ability of individuals to transfer these valuable assets between firms. For example, the legal profession has long held that clients should be free to choose their attorneys and, therefore, adheres to norms that do not allow the use of restrictive covenants such as CNCs and NSCs (Campbell, Ganco, et al, 2012).…”

Section: Under What Conditions? Environmental and Institutional Factorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Employee Mobility and Organizational Outcomes

Mawdsley

Somaya

2015

Journal of Management

175

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A large and growing literature spanning multiple fields has identified employee mobility as a critical influence on several important organizational outcomes. However, extant research on the topic is highly fragmented and lacks a unifying theoretical framework, impeding the development of a cumulative conceptually integrated body of research. We seek to remedy this situation by undertaking a review of research on employee mobility and its organizational impacts and casting it within a novel integrative conceptual framework. As a critical foundation for this framework, we highlight how the various organizational impacts of employee mobility are ultimately engendered by different dimensions of human and/or relational capital that are conveyed by mobile individuals. Building on this foundation, we describe how multilevel contextual factors-characterized as attributes of the employee, source and destination firms, and environmental conditions-may moderate the transfer and utilization of human and rela- IntroductionOver the last two decades, a significant research literature has emerged about the interorganizational movement of personnel and its substantial individual-level, organizational, and societal impacts. Inquiry into this phenomenon has spanned diverse fields, including economics, human resource management (HRM), strategic management, and sociology. However, while each of these respective research streams has provided valuable insights into the antecedents and consequences of the interorganizational movements of talent, the result is a research literature on employee mobility that is highly fragmented and disorganized.Despite its lack of coherence, literature on employee mobility is of particular interest to strategy and management scholars because the interorganizational movement of personnel affects important organizational outcomes, such as innovation (e.g., Rao & Drazin, 2002;Song, Almeida, & Wu, 2003), learning (e.g., Singh & Agrawal, 2011), capability acquisition and divestiture (e.g., Agarwal, Echambadi, Franco, & Sarkar, 2004), market entry (Boeker, 1997), relationship management (e.g., Broschak, 2004;Carnahan & Somaya, 2013;Somaya, Williamson, & Lorinkova, 2008), and even firm failure (e.g., Phillips, 2002;Wezel, Cattani, & Pennings, 2006). Building on Arrow's observation that the "mobility of personnel among firms provides a way of spreading information" (1962: 615), both scholars and industry practitioners alike have recognized that successfully navigating the market for human resources (HR) can be an important driver of firm competitive advantage (Barney, 1991;Cappelli, 2000;Gardner, 2002;Michaels, Handfield-Jones, & Axelrod, 2001).Moreover, ongoing technological, societal, and economic changes are accelerating the tendency for employees to switch employers (Cappelli, 2000;Henderson & Bierman, 2009) and increasing the intensity with which firms compete over high caliber talent (Coff, 1997;Gardner, 2005). Additionally, employees have become increasingly strategic in managing their careers by buildi...

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Who Leaves, Where to, and Why Worry? Employee Mobility, Employee Entrepreneurship, and Effects on Source Firm Performance

Cited by 187 publications

References 80 publications

The Architecture of Dynamic Capability Research Identifying the Building Blocks of a Configurational Approach

The Architecture of Dynamic Capability Research Identifying the Building Blocks of a Configurational Approach

Shifts and Ladders: Comparing the Role of Internal and External Mobility in Managerial Careers

Employee Mobility and Organizational Outcomes

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