Making the Most of the Revolving Door: The Impact of Outward Personnel Mobility Networks on Organizational Creativity

Frédéric C. Godart (), Andrew V. Shipilov () and Kim Claes ()
Additional contact information
Frédéric C. Godart: INSEAD, 77305 Fontainebleau, France
Andrew V. Shipilov: INSEAD, 77305 Fontainebleau, France
Kim Claes: INSEAD, 77305 Fontainebleau, France

Organization Science, 2014, vol. 25, issue 2, 377-400

Abstract: We examine the impact of key personnel’s loss to competition on their former employers’ creative performance. Using archival data on the career histories of designers and the creative performance of their fashion houses between 2000 and 2010, we find that a house’s outward centrality in the network of personnel mobility—resulting from personnel departures—has an inverted U-shaped relationship with the house’s creative performance. This relationship is moderated by the house’s inward centrality in a network of personnel mobility stemming from hiring competitors’ employees, the tenure of its creative directors, the accomplishments of these directors, and the house’s status. Our results suggest that organizations can enhance their creativity by relying on ideas obtained through relationships with their former employees long after these employees left to work for the competition. However, this effect is contingent upon characteristics of the organization that may be associated with its capacity to absorb these ideas and its ability to signal legitimacy of the resulting output to the external audiences.

Keywords: absorptive capacity; fashion industry; organizational creativity; outward centrality; personnel mobility networks; status (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2013.0839 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:25:y:2014:i:2:p:377-400

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Organization Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().