Sink or Swim: The Role of Workplace Context in Shaping Career Advancement and Human-Capital Development

Shinjinee Chattopadhyay () and Prithwiraj Choudhury ()
Additional contact information
Shinjinee Chattopadhyay: College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois 61820
Prithwiraj Choudhury: Harvard Business School, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts 02163

Organization Science, 2017, vol. 28, issue 2, 211-227

Abstract: We develop and test predictions on how early career challenges arising from the workplace context affect short- and long-term career advancement of individuals. Typically an organization’s decision to deploy a manager to one of several possible contexts is endogenous to unobservable factors, and selection makes it challenging to disentangle the effect of workplace context on individual career advancement. We work around this problem by studying an organization, the Indian Administrative Services, which deploys entry-level managers quasirandomly across India. We find that managers deployed to more challenging contexts early in their careers experience faster career advancement in the short term. We present suggestive evidence that this is because challenging contexts provide managers more opportunities to develop skills (“crucible experiences”), and a greater motivation to relocate out of the challenging context. We also find that managers deployed to a challenging context early in their careers continue to experience faster advancement in the long term, suggesting that initial deployment to a challenging context is associated with human capital development. Managers initially deployed to more challenging contexts were not, however, more likely to break into the upper echelons of the organization.

Keywords: location; workplace context; career advancement; performance; individuals; promotion; crucible experiences; motivation; nternal mobility; human capital development; microfoundations; behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1115 (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:28:y:2017:i:2:p:211-227

Access Statistics for this article

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