Career diversity and project performance in the Italian television industry

Abstract

This paper contributes to boundaryless career research by focusing on how past diversity in the career patterns acquired across prior project-based industries and within the same project-based industry may influence current project performance. This study examines the “knowing how” elements accumulated in the past by team members across and within project-based industries as career-related measures of diversity. To address this issue, this paper analyzes the creative context of Italian TV drama series production teams by investigating the career patterns of 1736 actors who worked in this industry from 1996 to 2010. To quantify the differences between career patterns, optimal matching analysis is used.This study finds an inverted U-shaped relationship between past career diversity accumulated across project-based industries and current project-performance; the study finds further that past career diversity achieved within the same project-based industry negatively moderates the inverted U-shaped relationship between past career diversity accumulated across project-based industries and current project-performance. These findings are consistent with the idea that the two patterns of career achievement – across project-based industries and within the same project-based industry – are not complementary but rather serve as imperfect substitutes.