My Manager Moved! Manager Mobility and Subordinates’ Career Outcomes

Abstract

How do managers’ moves across jobs affect the subordinates they leave behind? Manager mobility disrupts established manager-subordinate relationships, as subordinates must now learn to work with a replacement. We explore how this relational disruption affects subordinates’ objective career success – specifically their financial rewards and subsequent promotion chances. We argue that manager mobility may have both positive and negative implications for subordinate outcomes. The absence of an established relationship may reduce subordinates’ performance and managers’ propensity to reward them; on the other hand, relational disruption may make subordinates more willing and able to seek out valuable opportunities elsewhere in the organization. We also argue that these effects are likely to be greatest for those subordinates who performed best under the previous manager. Using eight years of personnel data of employees working in the US offices of a Fortune 500 healthcare company, we show how managers’ mobility leads to a decrease in subordinates’ financial rewards, but an increase in promotion prospects. Contrary to our expectations, these outcomes are little affected by how subordinates performed under their prior manager, with those who were performing well seeing similar changes to those who were performing poorly.