You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, but Can You Ever Leave? A Theory of Firm Value Capture from Alumni

Ingrid Smithey Fulmer (), Matthew L. Call (), Donald E. Conlon () and Anthony C. Klotz ()
Additional contact information
Ingrid Smithey Fulmer: School of Labor and Employment Relations, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois 61820
Matthew L. Call: Mays Business School, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843
Donald E. Conlon: Eli Broad College of Business, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824
Anthony C. Klotz: UCL School of Management, University College London, London E14 5AA, United Kingdom

Organization Science, 2024, vol. 35, issue 4, 1427-1442

Abstract: In modern organizations, key sources of competitive advantage are embedded in employees. Management theory has traditionally viewed employee exit as the end of firms’ relationships with employees and, consequently, the end of access to human capital and other resources embedded in departing individuals. However, recent research suggests that firms can benefit from the continuation of relationships with alumni employees. We argue that how organizations create and maintain connections to alumni is critical, as it shapes the nature of potentially valuable organization-level alumni resources. We develop a theory of firm value capture from alumni that explains how firms’ norms and policies before, during, and after employee exit affect firms’ alumni relations climate —a shared perception among a firm’s current and former employees that the firm values alumni. We further theorize that the alumni relations climate will lead to creation of firm-level alumni resources, with the configuration of these resources shaped by alumni identification. That is, the extent to which firms’ alumni identify with the firm versus with members of the firm’s remaining workforce (or balanced between the two) will have implications for the configuration of alumni resources that are potentially accessible to the firm. Our theory describes how these different alumni resource configurations come with inherent benefits and costs when it comes to the value that firms are able to capture from their alumni resources. We illustrate the value of this theoretical perspective by identifying meaningful practical implications and avenues for future research.

Keywords: organizational alumni; identification; alumni relations climate; alumni resources (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2019.13061 (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:35:y:2024:i:4:p:1427-1442

Access Statistics for this article

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