Macro Patterns of Employee Mobility: Learning from Large-Scale Employment Data

Abstract

This symposium intends to present five studies investigating drivers and directions of employee mobility at the macro-level. The goal of this symposium is to connect macro-level patterns and micro-level mechanisms of employee mobility and foster a research conversation across disciplinary fields, including careers, human resource management, and organizational behavior. In addition, by bringing together diverse projects using large-scale longitudinal data, this symposium will allow researchers to discuss opportunities, challenges, and methodological concerns that arise when working with such data. Over the past decades, careers have transformed from those developing inside organizations and governed by organizational rules and norms to those unfolding within labor markets and characterized by the variety of job transitions and flexibility of work arrangements (Arthur & Rousseau, 1996; Osterman & Burton, 2005). These changes raised a number of questions and stimulated the development of several research streams. They led to the emergence of new conceptualizations of career (Guan et al., 2019; Sullivan & Baruch, 2009), including recent models of sustainable career (De Vos, Van Der Heijden, Akkermans, 2020). They made scholars to reevaluate the employee-employer relationship (Bonet, Cappelli, Hamori, 2013; Cappelli & Keller, 2013) and reinforced the problems of talent management and retention (Bidwell, 2017; Cappelli & Keller, 2014). Given the importance of fit between individual characteristics and broader organizational context (Ployhart et al., 2014; Weller et al., 2019), growing diversity of individual work experience also adds new challenges to the effective matching of workers to jobs. What binds employees and employers in the modern labor markets? What drives employee mobility? Why do people stay or leave, where do they go, and what if they come back? The papers comprising this symposium aim at answering these questions by looking at the longitudinal employment data from five different countries: France, Germany, South Korea, Spain, and Sweden. Testing the theory with such large-scale data facilitates the identification of the most general patterns of labor mobility that might stay unnoticed while analyzing examples from a single organization or survey data from a specific population. Combining studies conducted in a diverse set of countries adds richness to the topics discussed. Collectively, these papers demonstrate what we can learn about individual behavior from the macro-patterns of employee mobility. Corporate career development opportunities and employee retention Presenter: Kira Choi; EMLYON Business School Crisis-related Wage Cuts and Employee Turnover: Who Leaves? Why? Where Do They Go? Presenter: Halil Sabanci; Frankfurt School of Finance & Management Presenter: Marta M Elvira; IESE Business School How Boomerang Mobility versus Mobility to a New Employer Relates to Career Sustainability Presenter: Katja Dlouhy; U. of Mannheim Presenter: Ariane Froidevaux; U. of Texas At Arlington Question of Fit: Managerial Experience and Organizational Design Presenter: Roxana Barbulescu; HEC Paris Presenter: Federica De Stefano; HEC Paris Presenter: Olga Ivanova; USI Lugano Multiple Job Affiliations and Entrepreneurship Presenter: Chanchal Balachandran; U. of Liverpool Management School Presenter: Filippo Carlo Wezel; USI Lugano