Employee Mobility: A Conversation Across Disciplines and Setting a New Agenda (Introduction)

Employee mobility has significant implications for the ability of organizations to transform their capabilities and increase their competitive advantage. Over the past decades, research from different disciplines (i.e., strategic management, economics, sociology and OB/HR) have been paying increasing attention to the strategic implications of the internal employee mobility (i.e., lateral vs. promotion) and of the external employee mobility (i.e., within and between industries; move to rivals and employee entrepreneurship). Cumulatively, these streams of research and subject areas have examined how organizational know how is embedded in the minds of individuals and how their movement within and across firms serves as a conduit for the transfer of critical knowledge. There is disagreement, however, on the degree of discretion people have over that knowledge and on the mechanisms that enhance or limit their ability to utilize that knowledge and expertise within and across firms. More critically, the lack of a unifying conceptual structure within and across different disciplines limits our ability to gain comparative insights regarding the varying effects of the various mechanisms associated with each type of mobility. Does the diversity of perspectives on mobility enrich or fragment our understanding of them? Does it undermine our understanding by encouraging a proliferation of uncorroborated ideas? The diversity of theoretical lenses, contexts and methods motivates calls for a critical theoretical integration. To this aim, this volume in Advances in Strategic Management proposes across-discipline conversations and it identifies new theoretical and empirical directions to the study of employee mobility.