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Star Performers in Twenty-First-Century Organizations
Personnel Psychology
Abstract
We argue that changes in the nature of work in 21st-century organizations have led to the emergence of star performers—a few individuals who contribute a disproportionate amount of output. We describe how stars negate the long-held belief that the distribution of individual performance is normal and, instead, suggest an underlying power law distribution. In addition, we offer 9 propositions to guide future empirical research on star performers and an underlying power law distribution of individual performance. We describe how the presence of stars is likely to affect all individual-, team-, and firm-level management theories addressing individual performance directly or indirectly, but focus on specific implications for those addressing human capital, turnover, compensation, downsizing, leadership, teamwork, corporate entrepreneurship, and microfoundations of strategy. In addition, we discuss methodological considerations necessary to carry out our proposed research agenda. Finally, we discuss how a consideration of star performers has important implications for management practice.
... Furthermore, traditional models of employment assume homogeneity in employment contracts among workers in the same organizational positions (Muchinsky, 2003). Taking into account potential disparity of the workforce regarding firm-specific human capital investments (Aguinis & O'Boyle, 2014), the main resources management policies seem to necessitate a paradigm shift by also considering heterogeneity in the way people, with different levels and potential of firm-specific human capital, are managed. ...
... In most 21st-century industries where firm-specific human capital is central to value creation, pay dispersion relates positively to higher levels of performance because compensation accurately reflects the extensive heterogeneity in individual production (and talent) levels (Aguinis & O'Boyle, 2014). This single parameter of human resource management pushes toward more idiosyncratic work arrangements. ...
... Several scholars have shown that firms' receptiveness is growing. The peak of idiosyncratic arrangements at work can be reached with specific work arrangements for star employees (Aguinis & O'Boyle, 2014) as the star management literature underlines (see also Call et al., 2015). The dark side of specific work arrangements is obviously the enhancement of animosity and perception of injustice among those not receiving them. ...
Recent organizational economics literature has shown that agency theory is wrong from a legal standpoint and suggests building a renewed approach to corporate governance in cognitive capitalism. This article invites a rethinking of internal governance within modern firms based on a strong specific human capital. We propose a theoretical framework based on several building blocks from a team production approach in order to exhibit an internal governance structure in firms based on human capital. The article complements the team production model of corporate governance by addressing theoretical and practical issues associated with the development of a legally supported modern internal governance structure, and it is in line with the functioning of firms, which is increasingly based on the pursuit of more democratic and pluralistic governance.JEL Codes : J50, L10, L20, M10, P12
... Research top performance is attracting the attention of academic communities; it is also attracting the attention of science policy communities, at all levels from departments to institutions to national systems to the global science system (Aguinis and O'Boyle 2014). Exceptionally high producers of scholarly publications are "strategic" in studying academic science (Fox and Nikivincze 2021). ...
... The steep productivity stratification of scientists has been examined in basic publications for both academic career studies and bibliometrics. Top performers have been termed star scientists (Abramo et al. 2009;Carrasco and Ruiz-Castillo 2014); stars, superstars, and star performers (Rosen 1981;Serenko et al. 2011;Aguinis and O'Boyle 2014;Agrawal et al. 2017;Sidiropoulos 2016); the best (O'Boyle and Aguinis 2012); the prolific (Fox and Nikivincze 2021) and prolific professors (Piro et. al 2016); top producing authors (Halevi et al. 2015) and hyperprolific authors (Ioannidis et al. 2018); as well as top researchers (Cortés et al. 2016), top performers (Abramo et al. 2011), and academic and scientific elites (Larivière et al. 2010;Parker et al. 2010). ...
In this research, the contributions of a highly productive minority of scientists to the national Polish research output over the past three decades (1992–2021) is explored. In almost all previous research, the approaches to high research productivity are missing the time component. Cross-sectional studies were not complemented by longitudinal studies: Scientists comprising the classes of top performers have not been tracked over time. Three classes of top performers (the upper 1%, 5%, and 10%) are examined, and a surprising temporal stability of productivity patterns is found. The 1/10 and 10/50 rules consistently apply across the three decades: The upper 1% of scientists, on average, account for 10% of the national output, and the upper 10% account for almost 50% of total output, with significant disciplinary variations. The Relative Presence Index (RPI) we constructed shows that men are overrepresented and women underrepresented in all top performers classes. Top performers are studied longitudinally through their detailed publishing histories, with micro-data coming from the raw Scopus dataset. Econometric models identify the three most important predictors that change the odds ratio estimates of membership in the top performance classes: gender, academic age, and research collaboration. The downward trend in fixed effects over successive six-year periods indicates increasing competition in academia. A large population of all internationally visible Polish scientists (N=152,043) with their 587,558 articles is studied. Implications for high-productivity studies are shown, and limitations are discussed.
... The performance of star performers, by definition, dramatically exceeds that of their 'average' peers. Empirical evidence for such non-normally distributed performance has been reported across occupations, professions, and industries (Aguinis and O'Boyle, 2014;Aguinis et al., 2018;Asgari et al., 2021;Bradley and Aguinis, 2023;Joo et al., 2017). ...
... Finally, the evidence found in this study for lognormal performance distributions and their generative mechanism extends emerging theories, which have primarily investigated star performers in more traditional salaried or professional settings (Aguinis and O'Boyle Jr., 2014;Aguinis et al., 2018;Asgari et al., 2021;Bradley and Aguinis, 2023), to those in digital and entrepreneurial contexts. The reported insights into extreme entrepreneurial performance on digital platformsdrawing upon concepts and theories from complexity science, information economics, and work designhave important implications for entrepreneurship theory and practice; these are elaborated upon in the Discussion section of this paper. ...
This study extends emerging theories of star performers to digital platforms, an increasingly prevalent entrepreneurial context. It hypothesizes that the unique characteristics of many digital platforms (e.g., low marginal costs, feedback loops, and network effects) produce heavy-tailed performance distributions, indicating the existence of star entrepreneurs. Using longitudinal data from an online learning platform, proportional differentiation is identified as the most likely generative mechanism and lognormal distribution as the most likely shape for distributions of entrepreneurial performance in digital contexts. This study contributes theory and empirical evidence for non-normal entrepreneurial performance with implications for scholars and practitioners of digital entrepreneurship. Executive summary The performance of 'star' entrepreneurs on digital platforms can be 100-or 1000-fold that of their average competitors. When performance is plotted as a distribution, star performers reside in the tails of these distributions. The assumption of a normal distribution of performance in the bulk of entrepreneurship research implies that most performance observations are clustered around the average. Instead, most entrepreneurs on digital platforms exhibit sub-par performance, while a minority captures a major fraction of the generated value. This paper argues that the unique characteristics of digital contexts-nearly zero marginal costs, feedback loops, and network effects-drive such extreme performance. Using data from Udemy, a digital platform where independent producers (entrepreneurs) offer educational videos (digital products) to a large pool of potential customers, we provide evidence that entre-preneurial performance is lognormally rather than normally distributed. We further identify proportional differentiation as the underlying generative mechanism. Thus, star performance on digital platforms is not driven only by the rich-get-richer effect. Instead, both the initial value of performance and the rate at which it is accumulated play important roles in explaining extreme performance outcomes. This discovery has important implications for entrepreneurship theory and practice. Our findings, for example, signal that some late entrants who successfully pursue high customer accumulation rates in domains with high knowledge intensity can become star entrepreneurs.
... Fascination with star performers -from Sheryl Sandberg to LeBron James to Indra Nooyi -has been seen throughout history and popularized by books such as Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan (O'Boyle & Kroska, 2017). Stars research widely suggests that star performers produce exceptional output that offers significant value to organizations (Aguinis & O'Boyle, 2014;Kehoe et al., 2018;Taylor & Bendickson, 2021). For instance, Google's Vice President of Engineering, Alan Eustace, famously remarked, "one top-notch engineer is worth 300 times or more than the average" (Tam & Delaney, 2005: para. ...
... Beyond revealing the rarity of stars, these studies suggest that most teams comprise nonstar incumbents. Given that the addition of a star performer is an important and rare team event (Aguinis & O'Boyle, 2014), we examine the initial attribution that incumbents make about a star newcomer who joins their team. ...
... Fascination with star performers -from Sheryl Sandberg to LeBron James to Indra Nooyi -has been seen throughout history and popularized by books such as Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan (O'Boyle & Kroska, 2017). Stars research widely suggests that star performers produce exceptional output that offers significant value to organizations (Aguinis & O'Boyle, 2014;Kehoe et al., 2018;Taylor & Bendickson, 2021). For instance, Google's Vice President of Engineering, Alan Eustace, famously remarked, "one top-notch engineer is worth 300 times or more than the average" (Tam & Delaney, 2005: para. ...
... Beyond revealing the rarity of stars, these studies suggest that most teams comprise nonstar incumbents. Given that the addition of a star performer is an important and rare team event (Aguinis & O'Boyle, 2014), we examine the initial attribution that incumbents make about a star newcomer who joins their team. ...
... Talent identification, indeed, is formally defined as the identification of a talent pool comprised of high-potential, highperforming incumbents capable of contributing to their organization's sustainable competitive advantage (Collings & Mellahi, 2009). Legitimized by its (assumed) disproportionate contributions to team and organizational performance, this elite group enjoys increased deference and resources (Aguinis & O'Boyle, 2014). ...
... In the US literature-much more so than in the European literature-the talent management phenomenon is typically equated to performance management, in particular the management of 'star performers' (Aguinis & O'Boyle, 2014) or 'A-players' (Becker, Huselid, & Beatty, 2009). Although it is true that there are clear linkages between talent management and performance management-since the identification of employees as 'talents' is commonly based on performance and potential scores given by supervisors (Collings & Mellahi, 2009)-one very specific feature of talent management sets it apart from other, related phenomena: the use of the 'talent' label itself. ...
... The first organizational feature that we consider is the distribution of performance across employees. Research has recently emerged examining performance distributions and the nature of star performers in different domains (Aguinis et al. 2018;Aguinis and O'Boyle 2014). Much of this research examines whether and under what conditions performance follows a normal distribution characterized by the familiar bell curve versus a power law with a positive skew. ...
... At the start of the simulation, the distribution of individual employee performance is set to either a normal or power curve. These two distributions were selected because they occur frequently across various organizational contexts (Aguinis and O'Boyle 2014;Beck et al. 2014). ...
Prior explanations for the observed result that employee cooperation demonstrates both positive and negative relationships with organizational performance often require psychological reactions or cognitions. We use an agent-based model to assume away these effects and demonstrate a possible alternative relying on just three, simple features. These include (1) limits to an employee’s ability to help a colleague while also performing his or her own task, (2) the distribution of performance across the collective, and (3) the method of aggregating individual to organizational performance. Our model offers an alternative explanation to an empirical result, simple and sufficient conditions for producing a phenomenon, implications for theory on the nature of employee helping, and practical advice to evaluate the merits of helping interventions.
... Within this approach talent tends to equal high performers-i.e., those that consistently demonstrate superior performance in relation to others (Aguinis & O'Boyle, 2014;Bish & Kabanoff, 2014). For instance, Silzer and Dowell (2010) defines talent as a group of employees within an organization who are exceptional in terms of skills and abilities either in a specific technical area, a specific competency, or a more general area; and Williams (2000) as those people who demonstrate exceptional ability and achievement in an array of activities and situations, or within a specialized field of expertise, on a regular basis. ...
... Specifically, it is said to benefit from the 'Matthew Effect'-i.e., the effect whereby the allocation of more resources to the better performers in the organization generate greater return on investment since more investments are made where more returns can be expected (Bothner et al., 2011). Star performers are seen as the single most important driver of organizational performance since they create exponentially more value for their organizations than average employees (Aguinis & O'Boyle, 2014;Smart, 2005), which makes investing disproportionally on them seems justified. Moreover, the distinctive treatment of employees based on their differential talents can create a 'continuous tournament' in which employees are motivated to develop and apply the skills and qualities the organization requires (Höglund, 2012). ...
As happens with many managerial terms, talent is a captivating word that people seem to implicitly understand and often use but, actually, it is very problematic to obtain a single definition. Already in 2006, The Economist posited “companies do not even know how to define ‘talent’, let alone how to manage it”. In fact several authors attributed the lack of clarity regarding the TM construct to the inadequate operationalization of talent (Garrow & Hirsh, 2008; Lewis & Heckman, 2006; Reilly, 2008; Tansley, 2011). Indeed, in most of the articles and books about TM the term talent is usually taken for granted, and when it is not a cornucopia of meanings emerges since it seems that every writer has their own idea of what talent does and does not encompass (Gallardo-Gallardo, Dries, & González-Cruz, 2013). As the ongoing confusion around the meaning of talent in business is hindering the acknowledgement of effective TM theories, programs and practices, understanding how ‘talent’ is defined and operationalized turns out to be one of the most prevalent topics in the field (cf. Gallardo-Gallardo & Thunnissen, 2016). In this chapter, I provide a critical review of the evidence on talent conceptualization and operationalization within the business realm, and discuss how the different talent interpretations affect TM implementation. After all, only by knowing what talent is can we think of managing it properly.
... The present study explores mobility between the 10 individual productivity classes (constructed according to the 10 decile-based classes) throughout long academic careers, here encompassing early-, mid-, and late-career periods. Our initial hypotheses, which are based on research productivity literature (Allison et al., 1982;Fox, 1983;Turner & Mairesse, 2005), especially high research productivity literature focused on "top performers" and "prolific" scientists (Abramo et al., 2009;Aguinis & O'Boyle, 2014;Fox & Nikivincze, 2021;Kwiek, 2016;Li et al., 2019) are, first, that scientists are generally locked in within their productivity classes for years (Kelchtermans & Veugelers, 2013;Turner & Mairesse, 2005); second, we argue that the elite strata of highly productive scientists often continue their entire careers as being highly productive (Allison & Stewart, 1974;David, 1994); and, finally, we argue that radical changes in productivity classes, especially upward, although popular in narratives about academic careers, are highly improbable in practice because of the cumulative nature of the advantages and disadvantages in careers, as shown over the decades in the traditional sociology of science (Cole & Cole, 1973;DiPrete & Eirich, 2006;Merton, 1973). ...
The present study focuses on persistence in research productivity over the course of an individual's entire scientific career. We track "late-career" scientists-scientists with at least 25 years of publishing experience (N=320,564)-in 16 STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine) and social science disciplines from 38 OECD countries for up to five decades. Our OECD sample includes 79.42% of late-career scientists globally. We examine the details of their mobility patterns as early-career, mid-career, and late-career scientists between decile-based productivity classes, from the bottom 10% to top 10% of the productivity distribution. Methodologically, we turn a large-scale bibliometric dataset (Scopus raw data) into a comprehensive, longitudinal data source for research on careers in science. The global science system is highly immobile: half of global top performers continue their careers as top performers and one-third of global bottom performers as bottom performers. Jumpers-Up and Droppers-Down are extremely rare in science. The chances of moving radically up or down in productivity classes are marginal (1% or less). Our regression analyses show that productivity classes are highly path dependent: there is a single most important predictor of being a top performer, which is being a top performer at an earlier career stage.
... The skewness of science has been the topic of numerous bibliometric publications (e.g., Albarrán et al., 2011;Carrasco & Ruiz-Castillo, 2014;Ruiz-Castillo & Costas, 2014). Recent studies include research on variously termed highly productive scientists: stars and superstars (Abramo et al., 2009a(Abramo et al., , 2009bAgrawal et al., 2017;Aguinis & O'Boyle, 2014;Sidiropoulos et al., 2016;Yair et al., 2017), the best (O'Boyle & Aguinis, 2012), prolific professors (Piro et al., 2016), top researchers (Abramo et al., 2013;Cortés et al., 2016), and the academic elite (Yin and Zhi, 2017). ...
We approach productivity in science in a longitudinal fashion: We track scientists’ careers over time, up to 40 years. We first allocate scientists to decile-based publishing productivity classes, from the bottom 10% to the top 10%. Then, we seek patterns of mobility between the classes in two career stages: assistant professorship and associate professorship. Our findings confirm that radically changing publishing productivity levels (upward or downward) almost never happens. Scientists with a very weak past track record in publications emerge as having marginal chances of becoming scientists with a very strong future track record across all science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) fields. Hence, our research shows a long-term character of careers in science, with one’s publishing productivity during the apprenticeship period of assistant professorship heavily influencing productivity during the more independent period of associate professorship. We use individual-level microdata on academic careers (from a national registry of scientists) and individual-level metadata on publications (from the Scopus raw dataset). Polish associate professors tend to be stuck in their productivity classes for years: High performers tend to remain high performers, and low performers tend to remain low performers over their careers. Logistic regression analysis powerfully supports our two-dimensional results. We examine all internationally visible Polish associate professors in five fields of science in STEMM fields (N = 4,165 with Nart = 71,841 articles).
... Many decisions were made to keep the model parsimonious, which may also have constrained findings in the current study. Employee agents did not differ in skill/ability, which does not accurately represent the distribution of performance in the human population (Aguinis & O'Boyle, 2014;O'Boyle & Aguinis, 2012). In the interest of parsimony, the rate at which employees worked was determined by their current active jobs (tasks) and was not conditional on any trait variable known to psychologists, like general mental ability (GMA), conscientiousness (McCrae & Costa, 1987) or personality strength (Dalal et al., 2014(Dalal et al., , 2015Green et al., 2019;Meyer et al., 2009). ...
Organizational and psychological science have historically relied on experimental and correlational research. Computational modeling and simulation have emerged as a “third” way of doing science, though the use of modeling is inconsistent across subfields of psychology. Organizational psychology, the psychological study of individuals, groups, and work organizations, is a subdiscipline of psychology that has seen limited use of computational modeling. This dissertation constructs a series of agent-based models applied to topics in the organization sciences and psychology, motivated by research challenges encountered as an applied researcher in the organization sciences. Three models – a spatial ABM, a network ABM, and a population ABM – explore manager- subordinate proximity, formal organization hierarchy and informal networks and IQ- environment feedback loops, respectively.
Model 1, “A Spatial Agent-Based Model of Manager-Subordinate Proximity” uses ABM to explore the extent to which a spatial model can quantify the spontaneous encounters between managers and subordinates based on their relative locations in a multi-floor office setting. Results demonstrate that subordinates located on a different floor than their manager are substantially less likely to have even a single spontaneous encounter with their manager in a workday, despite relatively short geographic separation. Imposing top-down requirements to travel between floors may do surprisingly little to abate this problem. The model suggests several implications for how managers and subordinates are co-located, how certain co-locations can result in fewer unplanned encounters between managers and subordinates, and the effect of closed office versus open office seating on serendipitous contact frequency with team members. Potential extensions and applications germane to post-COVID19 return to office (RTO) efforts as well as possible uses for future infectious disease issues in work settings are discussed.
Model 2, “A Network Agent-Based Model of Formal Organization and Informal Networks” uses agent-based modeling to explore the extent to which informal networks affect organizational performance when added to a formal organization hierarchy, using an information-seeking task as part of a work process. Results indicate that the addition of informal network ties to a formal organization can improve overall organization performance, but there is a point of diminishing returns beyond which the presumed cost of additional informal ties and maintenance of those ties may exceed the benefit.
Model 3, “A Population Agent-Based Model Exploring the Flynn Effect” uses a population agent-based model to explore aspects of the reciprocal, gene-environment correlation formal model proposed by William Dickens and James Flynn in 2001 to explain the phenomenon of rising IQ in the 20th century known as the Flynn Effect. While the model does not reproduce the full FE gains, emergence of segregation by IQ and assortative mating were observed, and the model demonstrates the value of computational approaches for studying process dynamics for phenomena that are otherwise generally limited to infrequent, point-in-time measurement or static snapshots, as well as the need for continued modeling and research in this area as the possible complex environmental causes of the FE remain elusive. The model also leverages a twin-based study design, operationalizing in silico the study of identical twin agents raised apart.
... In Merton's reputation-and resource-based model of scientific careers, new resources are not simply rewards for past high productivity but serve the primary function of stimulating future high productivity: "The scientific community favors those who have achieved significant success in the past" (DiPrete & Eirich, 2006: 282). In the past decade, studies have looked intensively at high research productivity (e.g., Yair et al., 2017;Aguinis & O'Boyle, 2014;Agrawal et al., 2017;Abramo et al., 2017;Yin & Zhi, 2017;Piro et al., 2016;Kwiek, 2016Kwiek, , 2018. Most recently, Fox and Nikivincze (2021) studied highly prolific scientists from a social-organizational perspective that examined both individual characteristics and departmental features. ...
This longitudinal study explores persistence in research productivity at the individual level over academic lifetime: can highly productive scientists maintain relatively high levels of productivity. We examined academic careers of 2326 Polish full professors, including their lifetime biographical and publication histories. We studied their promotions and publications between promotions (79,027 articles) over a 40-year period across 14 science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) disciplines. We used prestige-normalized productivity in which more weight is given to articles in high-impact than in low-impact journals, recognizing the highly stratified nature of academic science. Our results show that half of the top productive assistant professors continued as top productive associate professors, and half of the top productive associate professors continued as top productive full professors (52.6% and 50.8%). Top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top transitions in productivity classes occurred only marginally. In logistic regression models, two powerful predictors of belonging to the top productivity class for full professors were being highly productive as assistant professors and as associate professors (increasing the odds, on average, by 179% and 361%). Neither gender nor age (biological or academic) emerged as statistically significant. Our findings have important implications for hiring policies: hiring high- and low-productivity scientists may have long-standing consequences for institutions and national science systems as academic scientists usually remain in the system for decades. The Observatory of Polish Science (100,000 scientists, 380,000 publications) and Scopus metadata on 935,167 Polish articles were used, showing the power of combining biographical registry data with structured Big Data in academic profession studies.
... The functionality of the human body is important to our review of organizational body work research for at least three reasons. First, conceiving of the body in terms of functionality acknowledges the body as a medium for performance in organizations, which is of central interest to management scholars, both in terms of the performance of individuals (Aguinis & O'Boyle, 2014) and their contribution to organizational efficiency and effectiveness (Delaney & Huselid, 1996). Second, considering the functionality of the body highlights the significance of variations in the abilities of specific human bodies. ...
In this article, we review management and organizational research that describes and explains "organizational body work"-purposeful, organizationally embedded efforts to shape human bodies. We conceptualize human bodies in terms of three dimensions-materiality, meaning, and functionality-and argue that organizational body work is constituted by programs of purposeful effort involving activities situated in and shaped by organizational life. Based on a review of 209 articles and books that feature descriptions of organizational body work, we unpack the concept in three main ways. First, we offer an inductively developed process model of organizational body work that comprises five key themes: the triggers, forms, consequences, contexts, and the variations of bodies targeted. Second, a key observation that emerged from our review was that organizational body work is animated by a set of organizational tensions, and so we explore three such tensions situated in the cultural, health, and political dynamics of organizational life. Third, we suggest eight directions for future research intended to illustrate and inspire, rather than set boundaries around the study of organizational body work. * These authors contributed equally to the paper; their names are listed in reverse alphabetical order. Acknowledgments: We would like to thank our editors Carrie Leana and Denise Rousseau for their encouragement, guidance, and wisdom. We would also like to thank Gretta Corporaal, Daphne Demetry, Rachel Doern Natalia Efremova, Sally Maitlis, Chris Moos, Eleanor Murray, Joana Probert, and participants in the EGOS 2020 Colloquium for their constructive comments.
... Outside of reviews (e.g., Asgari et al., 2021;Call et al., 2015) and conceptual papers (e.g., Aguinis & O'Boyle, 2014;Kehoe et al., 2018), the last decade of star scholarship has largely taken stars' exceptional individual contributions as central to their identification and has pursued two broad lines of inquiry: (a) how the expert knowledge, vast social capital, and/or broad status that often both enable and result from stars' exceptional productivity (Call et al., 2015) affect the people and organizations in stars' orbits; and (b) the professional experiences of stars, including stars' emergence, cumulative advantage, and treatment by peers. With no shortage of reviews of recent star research (see immediately above), we focus here on broadly characterizing the key developments in this scholarship, while setting the stage for a discussion of the critical remaining questions within this area of inquiry. ...
... A question then is whether these two different conceptualizations may serve as a boundary condition. Although situations characterized by an aggregation of individual-level data could result in normal distributions due to the presence of homogenization that occurs when averaging out the performance of individuals on a team, there is also the possibility that individual stars may also drive the formation of heavy-tailed team distributions given their prevalence across teams (Aguinis and O'Boyle 2014). Thus, we ask the following. ...
Team research typically assumes that team performance is normally distributed: teams cluster around average performance, performance variability is not substantial, and few teams inhabit the upper range of the distribution. Ironically, although most team research and methodological practices rely on the normality assumption, many theories actually imply nonnormality (e.g., performance spirals, team composition, team learning, punctuated equilibrium). Accordingly, we investigated the nature and antecedents of team performance distributions by relying on 274 performance distributions including 200,825 teams (e.g., sports, politics, firefighters, information technology, customer service) and more than 500,000 workers. First, regarding their overall nature, only 11% of the distributions were normal, star teams are much more prevalent than predicted by normality, the power law with an exponential cutoff is the most dominant distribution among nonnormal distributions (i.e., 73%), and incremental differentiation (i.e., differential performance trajectories across teams) is the best explanation for the emergence of these distributions. Second, this conclusion remained unchanged after examining theory-based boundary conditions (i.e., tournament versus nontournament contexts, performance as aggregation of individual-level performance versus performance as a team-level construct, performance assessed with versus without a hard left-tail zero, and more versus less sample homogeneity). Third, we used the team learning curve literature as a conceptual framework to test hypotheses and found that authority differentiation and lower temporal stability are associated with distributions with larger performance variability (i.e., a greater proportion of star teams). We discuss implications for existing theory, future research directions, and methodological practices (e.g., need to check for nonnormality, Bayesian analysis, outlier management).
... In some instances, however, a single mechanism may shift a venture's trajectory in more dramatic fashion. One example is snowballing effects from one or more star performers (Aguinis, & O'Boyle, 2014) who the young, non-proven venture would not be able to hire under non-crisis conditions. Similarly, a crisis can provide a tipping point (as per self-organized criticality, Andriani & McKelvey, 2009) turning pre-existing trends and potentials into an avalanche of new demand or supply, as when COVID-19 unleashed already existing technically and economically feasible digital solutions that had previously been held back by legal constraints or user inertia (e.g., Zoom). ...
Building on the External Enabler Framework and prior research on digital entrepreneurship and innovation, we develop new theory of how entrepreneurial ventures can leverage societal crises to realize the extreme scaling potential enabled by digital technologies. Our theory posits a general pattern through which a) digital technologies provide baseline potentialities for venture scaling, b) crises provide venture-level additive enabling mechanisms, c) ventures’ task environments provide further positive feedback effects , and d) media discourse adds aggregate-level power effects, which cumulatively yield increasingly potent and non-linear scaling effects that also become progressively concentrated to a few, hyper-scaling ventures. We then outline how different development stages, market positions, and resource endowments make different hyper-scalers follow slightly different routes through the general pattern to achieve extreme outcomes. Through this work we take a major step forward in external enablement theorizing which we hope will inspire others to conduct empirical research and provide further theoretical refinements in this domain.
... TM arises from the human resource literature (Nijs et al., 2014); talent has been linked to human capital mostly, relying on the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm (Dries, 2013;Calabrò et al., 2020) which asserts that human capital is crucial for sustained competitive advantage (Aguinis & O'Boyle, 2014;Barney, 1991). It has been suggested that the human capital perspective is limited and potentially flawed because it relies on the resource-based author's accepted manuscript view and therefore psychological elements are not included when considering talent (Nijs et al., 2014). ...
... TM arises from the human resource literature (Nijs et al., 2014); talent has been linked to human capital mostly, relying on the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm (Dries, 2013;Calabrò et al., 2020) which asserts that human capital is crucial for sustained competitive advantage (Aguinis & O'Boyle, 2014;Barney, 1991). It has been suggested that the human capital perspective is limited and potentially flawed because it relies on the resource-based author's accepted manuscript view and therefore psychological elements are not included when considering talent (Nijs et al., 2014). ...
... го времени это положение игнорировалось, серьезные исследования начались лишь в последнее десятилетие (Ford et al., 2011;Yelon et al., 2015). Сейчас в фокусе рассмотрения -личностный анализ (Huang et al., 2017), анализ «звездных» исполнителей, отошедший от традиционной идеи однородности обучаемых и нормальном распределении результатов обучения по исполнителям (Aguinis, O'Boyle, 2014). Широкое распространение компьютерных тренажеров потребовало адекватных мер оценки переноса у отдельных обучаемых (Dozortsev et al., 2015). ...
Характеризуются проблемы подготовки оперативного персонала в промышленности в условиях меняющихся условий труда и появления новых средств обучения. Обосновывается необходимость обратной связи в компьютерном тренинге для усиления переноса приобретаемых навыков на реальную работу операторов. Исследуется возможность использования характеристик структурного знания (СЗ) для оценки уровня профессиональной готовности операторов и меры переноса навыков. Рассматриваются пространственные и сетевые методы преставления и анализа СЗ, основанные на многомерном шкалировании оценок попарной взаимосвязи семантических единиц изучаемого объекта, иерархической кластеризации данных и теории графов. Подчеркивается сходство технологических процессов и литературных нарративов с точки зрения
усвоения и структуризации знаний. Описывается пилотный эксперимент по извлечению, представлению и оценке СЗ на примере романа Льва Толстого «Анна Каренина». Анализируются структуры графов, выделяемых методом сетевого психометрического шкалирования PathFinder из предъявляемых испытуемыми оценок попарного сходства/связности персонажей романа. Показывается зависимость между зрелостью структур, когерентностью исходных данных
и формальными параметрами графов (плотность, диаметр). Предлагается мультипликативный предиктор уровня сформированности СЗ. Намечается перспектива будущих исследований СЗ операторов как маркера переноса навыков в тренинге. / The paper describes the problems of industrial operating personnel training in the context of working conditions changing and new training tools emergence. The need for feedback in computer training to strengthen the acquired skills transfer to the real operators’ work is justified. The using of structural knowledge (SK) characteristics as a measure of operators’ professional readiness level and skills transfer is investigated. We consider spatial and network methods of SK’s representation and analysis based on multidimensional scaling of pairwise relationship estimates of the object under study semantic units, hierarchical clustering of data, and graph theory. The similarity of industrial processes and literary narratives in terms of knowledge assimilation and structuring is emphasized. A pilot experiment on the SK’s extraction, presentation, and evaluation is described using the example of Leo Tolstoy's novel “Anna Karenina”. The structures of graphs extracted from the test subjects' estimates of the novel's characters pairwise similarity/connectivity by the PathFinder network psychometric scaling method are analyzed. The relationship between the maturity of structures, the coherence of the source data, and the graphs’ formal parameters (density, diameter) is shown. A multiplicative predictor of the SK’ formation level is proposed. The future research prospect of operators’ SK as a marker of skills transfer in training is outlined.
... High-performing employees tend to have better opportunities for promotion and career progression than low-performing employees (Van Scotter, Motowidlo and Cross, 2000). Moreover, higher-performing individuals expect to be rewarded by their organization in return for their commitment (Aguinis and O'Boyle, 2014). Objective career success has generally been measured by salary data (see Ng et al., 2005Ng et al., , 2014Spurk et al., 2019) and career progression, and we include both these variables in our study. ...
Purpose
This paper explores the impact of high-performance human resource practices (HPHRPs) on the research performance and career success of academics.
Design/methodology/approach
Survey data was collected from 586 faculty members in the five largest public universities in Saudi Arabia.
Findings
The findings suggest that the HPHRPs of internal mobility and recognition had a strong impact on faculty members' career success and that these relationships were mediated by research performance. In addition, the study also found that the HPHRPs of training and recognition positively influenced research performance, while, surprisingly, the HPHRPs of participation in decision-making were found to have a negative effect on faculty members' research performance.
Originality/value
This study is original in combining research in human resource management (HRM) and career studies to develop a model that explains academic research performance and career success from the lens of HR practices. The results also provide leaders in Saudi Arabia's public higher education sector with empirical data on the impact of HPHRPs on academic research performance and career success.
... High-performing employees tend to have better opportunities for promotion and career progression than low-performing employees (Van Scotter, Motowidlo and Cross, 2000). Moreover, higher-performing individuals expect to be rewarded by their organization in return for their commitment (Aguinis and O'Boyle, 2014). Objective career success has generally been measured by salary data (see Ng et al., 2005Ng et al., , 2014Spurk et al., 2019) and career progression, and we include both these variables in our study. ...
Purpose: this paper explores the impact of High-Performance Human Resource Practices (HPHRPs) on the research performance and career success of academics.
Method/Design: survey data was collected from 586 faculty members in the five largest public universities in Saudi Arabia.
Findings: the findings suggest that the HPHRPs of internal mobility and recognition had a strong impact on faculty members’ career success, and that these relationships were mediated by research performance. In addition, the study also found that the HPHRPs of training and recognition positively influenced research performance. While, surprisingly, the HPHRPs of participation in decision-making was found to have a negative effect on faculty members’ research performance.
Originality/value: 0ur study is original in combining research in Human Resource Management (HRM) and Career Studies to develop a model that explains academic research performance and career success from the lens of HR practices. The results also provide leaders in Saudi Arabia’s public higher education sector with empirical data on the impact of HPHRPs on academic research performance and career success. <br/
... Звісно, можемо виокремити інші типи стратифікації, які виявляються в академічній професії 4 . Наприклад, страти фікація відповідно до влади, яка ділить науковців відповідно до позиції в академічній ієрархії, престижу й посад, які вони обіймають в університеті; стратифікація відповідно до віку, яка ділить науковців згідно з належністю до певної вікової групи 5 ; стратифікація відповідно до академічної ролі, яка ділить науковців відповідно до дослідницьких чи викладацьких ролей 6 ; стратифікація відповідно до доступу до фінансування на дослідження, яка ієрархізує науковців відповідно до шансів здобути фінансування; стратифікація відповідно до часописів, яка ділить науковців згідно з престижем часописів, у яких публікуються. Додатково значну роль відіграє сильна страти фікація з огляду на стать, яка пронизує всі вищезгадані типи. ...
Майже пів століття соціальна стратифікація в науці є про-блемою, що періодично постає в межах соціології нау-ки та соціології академічних кар’єр. Подане тут дослідження проведене, спираючись на потужні міжнародні дані опитуван-ня, й аналізує це явище, використовуючи широкі порівняльні кількісні показники, зібрані в одинадцяти європейських краї- нах (N = 8466 науковців, винятково ніверситетський сектор). Мета дослідження – перевірити гіпотезу, що ростуча напруга, яка виникає через зміну принципів академічного порядку, зміну способів управління інституціями вищої освіти та їх фі-нансування, переходить на мікрорівень окремого науковця, які змінюють його основі способи функціювання1. А також по-тужно змінюють стратифікацію в науці, яка і так завжди була мало демократичною і спиралася на нерівності. Сьогодні ці нерівності стають льнішими, аніж будь-коли раніше. Лише невелика частина академічних кадрів публікує свої статті в найкращих часописах, відповідає за більшість публікацій і ци-тувань, отримує найбільш конкурентні дослідницькі ґранти і, врешті-решт, заробляє більше і є більш інтернаціоналізова-на. Ніколи раніше поділи в науці не були такими иразними, оскільки саме сьогодні наука стала в тих декількох аспектах практично прозорою на рівні індивідів, дослідницьких груп, дисциплін, факультетів, навчальних закладів і, нарешті, націо-нальних систем науки.
Nasze badanie koncentruje się na trwałości bardzo wysokiej i bardzo niskiej indywi-dualnej produktywności badawczej z perspektywy całości kariery naukowej. Analizujemy produktywność naukowców znajdujących się na późnym etapie kariery, czyli publiku-jących od co najmniej 25 lat (N = 320 564) i pracujących w 38 krajach OECD (w tym w Polsce). Badamy wzorce ich mobilności pomiędzy dziesięcioma klasami produktyw-ności-od najniższej (dolnych10%) do najwyższej (górnych 10%). W pracy pokazujemy, że już na stosunkowo wczesnym etapie kariery naukowej roz-kład produktywności w ramach globalnej profesji naukowej na jej dwóch krańcach jest w dużej mierze ustalony. Początkowy rozkład utrzymuje się w czasie, przez lata i dzie-sięciolecia. Najmniej produktywni naukowcy niemal nigdy nie stają się najbardziej pro-duktywni, a najbardziej produktywni-najmniej produktywni. Uderzająca jest trwałość przynależności do klas najwyższej i najniższej produktywności z perspektywy cyklu ży-cia naukowców. Nasze badanie pokazuje, że globalny system nauki pod względem roz-kładu produktywności jest wyjątkowo sztywny. W tym celu przekształcamy potężny zbiór danych bibliometrycznych dotyczących publikacji i cytowań (surowe dane z bazy Scopus) w globalne, kompleksowe, wielowy-miarowe i co najważniejsze podłużne-czyli obejmujące zmiany w czasie-źródło da-nych na temat karier naukowych setek tysięcy naukowców. Jak dotąd nie badano indywi-dualnej produktywności publikacyjnej w ujęciu globalnym z perspektywy podłużnej, nie śledzono indywidualnych karier akademickich od pierwszej publikacji przez kolejnych 25-50 lat po to, aby porównywać między sobą zmiany przynależności do klas produk-tywności w czasie. W szczególności nie badano, czy w nauce zdarzają się sytuacje skraj-ne: czy najmniej produktywni naukowcy stają się naukowcami najbardziej produktywnymi (określamy ich mianem "skoczków"; i odwrotnie, najbardziej produktywni stają się nau-kowcami najmniej produktywnymi, nazywamy ich tu "spadkowiczami")?
W prezentowanej pracy szukamy odpowiedzi na proste pytanie badawcze dotyczące wpływu wcześniejszej indywidualnej produktywności naukowej na późniejszą produktywność naukową. Zakładając, że naukowcy mogą zmieniać klasy produktywności w trakcie swoich karier, poszukujemy wzorców mobilności między klasami produktywności w pięciu obszarach nauki (obejmujących łącznie 12 dyscyplin).
Analizujemy zmieniającą się produktywność 4165 polskich naukowców reprezentujących nauki ścisłe, techniczne, inżynieryjne, matematyczne i medyczne (STEMM) w miarę ich awansu na kolejne szczeble kariery akademickiej. Wszyscy analizowani naukowcy są doktorami habilitowanymi zatrudnionymi na pełen etat w sektorze szkolnictwa wyższego i posiadają stopień doktora habilitowanego.
Łącząc dane demograficzne i biograficzne pochodzące z krajowego rejestru naukowców (N = 99 935) z własnymi obliczeniami wykonanymi na podstawie metadanych Scopus dotyczących wszystkich polskich artykułów naukowych indeksowanych w ciągu ostatniego półwiecza (1973–2021, N = 935 167), analizujemy poszczególnych naukowców, którzy zmieniają klasy produktywności w czasie, w okresie obejmującym do 40 lat (zakres wieku biologicznego w próbie: 30–70 lat). Skupiamy się na dwóch etapach kariery: etapie pracy z doktoratem i etapie pracy z habilitacją.
Metodologicznym punktem wyjścia jest przypisanie wszystkich doktorów habilitowanych widocznych międzynarodowo w bazie Scopus do 10 aktualnych klas produktywności w okresie 2018–2021 (czyli według 10 decyli produktywności). Następnie analizujemy ich wcześniejszą produktywność z czasów, gdy byli doktorami, porównujemy ich z rówieśnikami w obrębie ich dziedzin nauki i retrospektywnie przypisujemy ich do 10 wcześniejszych klas produktywności (ponownie od najwyższych decyli do najniższych). Szczegółowo analizujemy indywidualne trajektorie karier naukowców w tych dwóch etapach kariery, łącząc obecną i wcześniejszą produktywność dla każdego naukowca, a następnie badając mobilność między klasami produktywności w zależności od dziedziny nauki i typu produktywności.
W szczególności interesuje nas porównanie wzorców mobilności między klasami produktywności pod względem czterech typów produktywności — pełnego i częściowego zliczania — zarówno w wersji znormalizowanej do prestiżu czasopism, jak i w wersji nieznormalizowanej.
W prezentowanym studium badamy trwałość przynależności do klas produktywności badawczej na poziomie indywidualnym w ciągu całej kariery akademickiej. Analizujemy przebieg kariery 2326 polskich profesorów tytularnych, uwzględniając ich biografie naukowe i historie publikacyjne. Badamy daty kolejnych awansów naukowych i liczbę publikacji (79 027 artykułów) pomiędzy awansami w ciągu 20-40 lat pracy naukowej w 14 dyscyplinach (nauki ścisłe, techniczne, inżynieryjne, matematyczne i medyczne, czyli w obszarze STEMM). Interesuje nas przemieszczanie się pomiędzy trzema klasami produktywności – najwyższą, przeciętną i najniższą – w trakcie kariery profesorów, od etapu doktoratu do etapu profesury tytularnej.
Zastosowaliśmy tutaj unikalne podejście do produktywności: produktywność znormalizowaną do prestiżu czasopisma, w ramach której większą wagę przypisuje się artykułom publikowanym w czasopismach o dużym wpływie na rozwój nauki niż w czasopismach o niskim wpływie, uznając tym samym wysoki stopień stratyfikacji nauki akademickiej pod kątem miejsca publikacji (zasada „publikacja nierówna publikacji”).
Nasze wyniki pokazują, że połowa najbardziej produktywnych doktorów kontynuowała pracę jako najbardziej produktywni doktorzy habilitowani, a z kolei połowa najbardziej produktywnych doktorów habilitowanych kontynuowała pracę jako najbardziej produktywni profesorowie tytularni (52,6% i 50,8%). Przechodzenie naukowców od najwyższej do najniższej i od najniższej do najwyższej klasy produktywności występowało w niewielkim stopniu: dotyczyło tylko 100 (4,3%) naukowców. W modelach regresji logistycznej dwoma silnymi czynnikami warunkującymi przynależność do najwyższej klasy produktywności wśród profesorów tytularnych okazały się wysoka produktywność w okresie bycia doktorem i wysoka produktywność w okresie bycia doktorem habilitowanym (zwiększając szanse średnio o 179% i 361%). Ani płeć, ani wiek (biologiczny lub akademicki) nie okazały się statystycznie istotne.
Building on research on star performance, gender, and situational constraints, we introduce a longitudinal process model explaining the gender gap in star emergence. We argue that star emergence is less likely for women than men due to stardom's association with men and masculinity. As a result, situational constraints are more likely to insulate women's performance in terms of knowledge, skills, and abilities development and evaluation (e.g., access to vicarious deliberate practice, biased standards), motivation (e.g., competition intensity, negative interpersonal behavior), and opportunity (e.g., access to high potential tasks, partner supportiveness in the extra‐work environment). We theorize that these factors lead to insulation cycles that reduce the likelihood of women emerging as stars over time. We also offer propositions about mitigators (e.g., strategic diversity goals and influential sponsors) that might attenuate these insulating effects. Finally, we discuss theoretical implications of understanding gender gaps in star emergence (e.g., performance insulation as gender inequity, the importance of a longitudinal perspective, insulation cycles, and star longevity) and practical implications for organizations to create equitable environments for star emergence (e.g., focusing on performance equity and facilitating gender inclusivity). We conclude that greater insight into the role of gender in star performance can also contribute to the broader understanding of gender gaps in organizations.
This is the protocol for a Campbell systematic review. The objectives are as follows: One goal of this systematic review is to identify whether merit pay predicts employee work motivation, effort, and performance; a second goal is to determine whether the association between merit pay and subsequent employee work motivation, effort, and performance is stronger depending on the actual relationship between the performance ratings and merit increases received, as well as on the perceived relationship by employees between their performance and their pay; a third goal is to identify whether the association between merit pay and subsequent employee motivation depends on what type of motivation is measured (i.e., intrinsic vs. extrinsic/general work motivation).
We approach productivity in science in a longitudinal fashion: We track scientists’ careers over time, up to 40 years. We first allocate scientists to decile-based publishing productivity classes, from the bottom 10% to the top 10%. Then, we seek patterns of mobility between the classes in two career stages: assistant professorship and associate professorship. Our findings confirm that radically changing publishing productivity levels (upward or downward) almost never happens. Scientists with a very weak past track record in publications emerge as having marginal chances of becoming scientists with a very strong future track record across all science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) fields. Hence, our research shows a long-term character of careers in science, with one’s publishing productivity during the apprenticeship period of assistant professorship heavily influencing productivity during the more independent period of associate professorship. We use individual-level microdata on academic careers (from a national registry of scientists) and individual-level metadata on publications (from the Scopus raw dataset). Polish associate professors tend to be stuck in their productivity classes for years: High performers tend to remain high performers, and low performers tend to remain low performers over their careers. Logistic regression analysis powerfully supports our two-dimensional results. We examine all internationally visible Polish associate professors in five fields of science in STEMM fields (N = 4,165 with Nart = 71,841 articles).
Prior studies have suggested that downsizing events can lead to a contagion of voluntary turnover among employees. In the current study, drawing on the turnover event theory, we propose that the relationship between downsizing and turnover can be nonlinear. We also propose that the presence of collective pay‐for‐performance (PFP) practices is an important but overlooked contingency that moderates the effects of downsizing. By analyzing a dataset collected from 317 firms with 634 firm‐year observations, we found that the relationship between downsizing and voluntary turnover rates takes an attenuated positive form, and that this relationship is mitigated in firms that have more collective PFP practices. Our findings contribute to the literature on downsizing, turnover, and collective PFP practices while also providing a specific practical implication pertaining to the mitigation of the disruptive effects of downsizing.
Research Summary
Pipeline hiring, repeatedly hiring individuals from the same external source organization, is a common recruiting practice. Yet, whether this pipeline approach improves incoming human capital quality or performance has limited empirical evidence. We argue that, in cooperative source‐hiring organization contexts, pipelines reduce the information asymmetries present in labor markets in a way that both attracts individuals with higher pre‐entry human capital and predicts postentry performance that surpasses pre‐entry expectations. In the context of particularly intense recruiting competition—American college football—we test and find support for these hypotheses. We also probe key boundary conditions, specifically discontinuity, geographic proximity, and factor market competition that highlight the limits of when the informational advantage is more or less salient.
Managerial Summary
Organizations often recruit through pipelines ‐ repeatedly hiring new workers from the same sources, such as universities or supply partners. Despite how common pipeline hiring is, we have little evidence to suggest if this practice helps hire more capable workers. Using rich data from American college football, we find that players who are successfully recruited through a pipeline tend to be rated as higher potential before joining their college team and perform better, holding their potential constant, in their collegiate career than players who joined from a standalone source. We argue that these benefits come from information flows between recruiting organizations, alumni, and prospective workers. When conditions make these information flows less exclusive, more interrupted, or redundant, we find evidence that the typical pipeline recruiting benefits diminish.
The star performer gender gap highlights women's challenges in being recognized as star performers. We investigated whether people hold shared beliefs about characteristics star performers possess (i.e., implicit star performer theories, ISPTs) and whether perceptions of stars are (a) gendered and (b) context‐specific. Guided by categorization theory, we argue that individuals have shared perceptions of what constitutes a star performer. Employing an inductive approach, we uncovered the existence of ISPTs that are distinct and differ from previously identified implicit theories, such as those about leadership. Specifically, stars were believed to have six characteristics: Driven, Relational, Extraordinary, Fascinating, Tenacious, and Brilliant. We then applied role congruity theory to argue that perceptions of star performers would be gendered and context‐dependent. Using an experimental approach, we ascertained that people associated star performers with more masculine than feminine attributes, what we labeled the think star, think men phenomenon. Moreover, this association was context‐dependent, such that the association of star performers with masculine attributes was stronger in men‐dominated occupations. Our third study used a non‐reactive approach (i.e., “Princeton trilogy”), and results showed that star performers are seen as possessing more masculine attributes than very good employees. Overall, our three studies using inductive, experimental, and indirect methods based on eight samples of 2322 participants consistently supported the existence of ISPTs and the think star, think men phenomenon, improving our understanding of the star performer gender gap.
The concept of talent management has been examined from the perspective of theories such as resource dependency theory, McKinsey research, and human capital approach, which are frequently cited in the literature. In this study, the values that the concept of talent management expresses for organizations in terms of different theories were examined and it was aimed to contribute to the literature. In the literature, the relationship of talent management with different variables has been examined in studies or theses related to talent management, and in some studies, the theories on which talent management is based are mentioned. However, these theories have not systematically been found in studies that only constitute the main headings of the study. It will be useful to researchers who want to use the concept of talent management in order to see the theories on which the concept of talent management is based in a single study.
In this paper, we undertake two primary tasks. First, we describe trends in pay → performance research since 1990. Examining 30+ years allows us to capture the evolution of thinking and methodology over time. For this purpose, we focus on scholarly work appearing in Personnel Psychology (PP), as well as in the Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP) and Academy of Management Journal (AMJ). As our second task, we go beyond analysis of broad trends, to take a deeper and more substantive dive into the specific topic of pay for performance (PFP) and related areas (pay dispersion, pay communication/transparency), while at the same time drawing on the broader literature on PFP that goes beyond the three journals listed above. We also discuss pay equity, endogeneity, and international issues. Finally, we suggest practical implications, as well as future research directions.
We examine whether accounting for high performing employee services as a right of use (ROU) asset and related liability on the balance sheet provide decision‐useful financial statement information to nonprofessional investors (NPIs). We compare accounting for the right to use employees services as an asset on‐balance‐sheet (ONBS) and off‐balance‐sheet (OFFBS) to examine the extent to which a ROU asset and related liability provides NPIs with decision‐useful information in assessing investment opportunity and likelihood to invest in a company's stock. We analyze one hundred and fifty‐five usable responses of which 84 are in OFFBS control condition and 71 are in ONBS treatment condition. We find that accounting for high performing employees services as a ROU asset ONBS or OFFBS provides decision‐useful information to NPIs that is not statistically different. Further analysis indicates that accounting for high performing employees as a ROU intangible asset presented ONBS, measured at fair value, or amortized cost with enhanced disaggregation and roll forward disclosures provide decision‐useful information to NPIs. The likelihood to invest in a company's stock significantly increases if the ROU asset is measured at fair value with changes recorded in net income. Results have economic and practical implications for investors, standard‐setters, and researchers.
There has a significant increase in the volume of research on the management of talent over recent decades; however, the question of what talent is remains under debate. How talent is understood and defined has significant implications for its management within organizations, yet these aspects are often overlooked in the extant literature. Through a review of 192 articles in the sub‐disciplines of talent management (sub‐stream of strategic human resource management), stars (human capital), and high potential (organizational behavior/‐psychology), we offer guidance for research on talent. Our findings suggest that the current research adopts an overly binary conceptualization of talent, as illustrated in five relevant dimensions: inclusive–exclusive, innate–acquired, transferable–context dependent, subject–object, and input–outcomes. We call for a more nuanced approach to the topic and build insights from paradox theory, encouraging a transition from “either/or” perspectives to “both/and” perspectives. Matching theory is identified as a useful lens to guide future research, and we offer suggestions for a more nuanced approach in practice by encouraging organizations and their stakeholders to embrace the paradoxes of talent.
W prezentowanym studium badamy trwałość przynależności do klas produktywności badawczej na poziomie indywidualnym w ciągu całej kariery akademickiej. Analizujemy przebieg kariery 2326 polskich profesorów tytularnych, uwzględniając ich biografie naukowe i historie publikacyjne. Badamy daty kolejnych awansów naukowych i liczbę publikacji (79 027 artykułów) pomiędzy awansami w ciągu 20-40 lat pracy naukowej w 14 dyscyplinach (nauki ścisłe, techniczne, inżynieryjne, matematyczne i medyczne, czyli w obszarze STEMM). Interesuje nas przemieszczanie się pomiędzy trzema klasami produktywności – najwyższą, przeciętną i najniższą – w trakcie kariery profesorów, od etapu doktoratu do etapu profesury tytularnej.
Zastosowaliśmy tutaj unikalne podejście do produktywności: produktywność znormalizowaną do prestiżu czasopisma, w ramach której większą wagę przypisuje się artykułom publikowanym w czasopismach o dużym wpływie na rozwój nauki niż w czasopismach o niskim wpływie, uznając tym samym wysoki stopień stratyfikacji nauki akademickiej pod kątem miejsca publikacji (zasada „publikacja nierówna publikacji”).
Nasze wyniki pokazują, że połowa najbardziej produktywnych doktorów kontynuowała pracę jako najbardziej produktywni doktorzy habilitowani, a z kolei połowa najbardziej produktywnych doktorów habilitowanych kontynuowała pracę jako najbardziej produktywni profesorowie tytularni (52,6% i 50,8%). Przechodzenie naukowców od najwyższej do najniższej i od najniższej do najwyższej klasy produktywności występowało w niewielkim stopniu: dotyczyło tylko 100 (4,3%) naukowców. W modelach regresji logistycznej dwoma silnymi czynnikami warunkującymi przynależność do najwyższej klasy produktywności wśród profesorów tytularnych okazały się wysoka produktywność w okresie bycia doktorem i wysoka produktywność w okresie bycia doktorem habilitowanym (zwiększając szanse średnio o 179% i 361%). Ani płeć, ani wiek (biologiczny lub akademicki) nie okazały się statystycznie istotne.
Do analiz wykorzystaliśmy dane pochodzące z prowadzonego przez nas Obserwatorium Polskiej Nauki (100 000 naukowców, 380 000 publikacji z ostatniej dekady) oraz metadane z bazy Scopus dotyczące nienal miliona (935 167) polskich artykułów z ostatnich 50 lat, uzyskane w ramach umowy o współpracy z laboratorium ICSR Lab prowadzonym przez firmę Elsevier.
In recent decades, scholars’ and practitioners’ interest in star performers and high‐potential employees (HiPos) has increased dramatically. To date, however, researchers have considered these two classifications of exceptional talent in relative isolation of one another, despite the fact that they are widely considered to comprise organizations’ most valuable employees. The current article identifies and explores key intersections in the heretofore‐siloed streams of research on star employees and HiPos. In so doing, we identify core assumptions, highlight questions that emerge at focal intersections, and offer a foundation for the cross‐fertilization of insights to strengthen the scholarly and practical impact of inquiry related to both groups. We then consider the implications of four significant recent trends in the world of work – increased employee mobility; greater focus on issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace; cross‐cultural issues; and the broader set of technological changes that are shaping the workplace – for research and practice related to stars and HiPos. Along the way, we highlight the integral and path‐breaking contributions of publications in Personnel Psychology to our knowledge about organizations’ best talent.
Research has advanced two perspectives on the fundamental issue of the relationship between member creativity and team creativity: the additive model (predicting with average member creativity) and the disjunctive model (predicting with highest member creativity). Inconsistent evidence raises the question of possible moderators. We address this question by developing moderating roles of task characteristics – task interdependence and task creativity requirement. In a meta‐analytic review of team creativity (and innovation) research, we hypothesized and supported that the additive model is more predictive in tasks with high interdependence and with low creativity requirements, and that the disjunctive model is more predictive for less interdependent tasks. The effectiveness of the disjunctive model, however, did not differ as a function of task creativity requirements. Further, our supplementary analysis showed that the additive model is more effective in tasks requiring only generating creative ideas than in tasks involving both generation and implementation of creative ideas.
Practitioner points
Because creative employees are in high demand, it is important to effectively select and assign creative individuals to teams for managing creativity.
Managing team creativity by selecting creative individuals for the team can be done following two strategies: an additive strategy prioritizing high levels of average member creativity or a disjunctive strategy prioritizing one particularly creative member.
Whether the additive or the disjunctive strategy is more effective is contingent on task characteristics: with high task interdependence, it is better to prioritize mean member creativity; with low task interdependence and with higher creativity requirements, it is better to prioritize one particularly creative team member.
This article reports a longitudinal study exploring talent management, through narratives provided by a group of managers of doctoral programmes in eight UK universities during the 2020 coronavirus outbreak. These managers were also academics, researchers and doctoral supervisors and their perspectives were gathered before and during “lockdown,” and then into the subsequent confused period of semi‐lockdown / second lockdown, as cases of Coronavirus increased again in late 2020. Changing socio‐economic circumstances, together with the added pressures of family responsibilities, impacted on participants' perceptions of changing roles and relationships during the pandemic. Over 12 months, six semi‐structured online interviews (each lasting between 50 and 120 minutes) were conducted, using available platforms, with intervening emails. The narratives showed both formal and informal “talent management methods” and emphasized the need to use both to attract and retain international students.
The greatest competition among rivals in many industries is not for market share but human capital. In the so‐called talent war, organisations compete aggressively to attract star employees—individuals with disproportionate productivity and external visibility—in pursuit of competitive advantage. Building on human capital and resource‐based view theories, we argue that firms' compensation strategies are influenced by the intangible assets that define stars. With data from Major League Baseball, we find that organisations are likely to pay higher wages to stars based on their prior performance and visibility. Furthermore, our data indicate that firm competitive position influences which of these intangible assets holds greater value for managers. We discuss the implications of these findings for organisations waging a war for talent and suggest directions for future research on a matter that is far from over.
Higher‐performing employees are extremely important to organizations due to their superior contribution to unit performance and vaulted value within their teams. In turn, they espouse higher work‐specific self‐worth (WSSW) evaluations that influence how they react to abusive supervision. Taking a self‐verification perspective, we theoretically explain how performance (through WSSW) augments the aversive nature of abusive supervision, which in turn affects higher‐performing employees’ job embeddedness and subsequent decisions to quit their jobs. Across three field studies, our model is supported as we find that performance is positively related to WSSW, which magnifies the negative effects of abusive supervision on satisfaction. Consequently, we discover that as job performance (and in turn self worth) increases, abusive supervision indirectly reduces job embeddedness and increases turnover through two forms of satisfaction. We expound upon how these findings contribute to both theory and practice.
We examine how peers form talent appraisals of team members, reframing talent identification as a status‐organising social process. Using decision trees, we modelled configurations of characteristics and behaviours that predicted dominant versus parallel routes to achieving the status of most talented team member. Across 44 multidisciplinary teams, talent status was most often granted to peers perceived as having both leadership and analytic talent; a STEM degree served a dominant signalling function. Where previous studies assumed that degree operates as a specific status characteristic, we show that a STEM degree operates as a diffuse status characteristic, which predicts status in general. We thus discovered that status hierarchies in teams are also based on the type of talent—and not just the level of talent—members are perceived to possess. In so doing, we offer a proof of concept of what we call ‘talent hierarchies’ in teams, for future research to build on.
Why do great companies and other organizations fail, sometimes abruptly? Why do admired leaders fall from their organizational pedestals? Why do young and promising managers derail? Why do organizations create and reinforce rules that manifestly damage both them and those that they employ, serve and sustain? Leadership is a much-discussed but ill-defined idea in business and management circles. Analysing and understanding the skills and behaviours exhibited in leadership practice, leaders exhibit paradoxical activities that challenge our understanding of organizations.
In this text, the authors identify leadership behaviours that compete toward business equilibrium: selfish versus selfless, distance versus proximity, consistency versus individuality, enforcing professional standards versus flexibility, and control versus autonomy. These paradoxical dilemmas require a reflexive and analytical approach to a subject that is tricky to define. The book explores the paradoxes of power and leadership not as a panacea for solving organizational problems but as a lens through which leadership and power are seen as an exercise in dynamic balance. Read this book as an invitation to the paradoxes of power and leadership that frame organizational life today. Be prepared to find surprises – and some counterintuitive arguments.
Providing a thought-provoking guide to the traits and skills that will help readers to understand and navigate paradoxical leadership behaviour, this reflexive book will be useful reading for students and scholars of business, management and psychology globally.
People management has become an herculean task of HR department of any organization. Recruitment to retirement is the common parlance of HR functions. Identifying the ideal talent to fit in the right place is the solution to the challenge of sustenance and retention. In the era of leapfrogging the question of talent fit has become secondary to retain the talent and managing challenges of these kinds is envisaged in this article by sourcing different data sources. Talent management is processing, acquiring, maintaining, developing, retaining and utilizing the human resources to have a competitive advantage in the market place. The article tries to bring in the wide concept of talent management in a comprehensive way. The review of literature done through secondary data on the subject had helped to coordinate, consolidate and synthesize the concepts into a nutshell. The article enables the reader to get a conceptual clarity and thus shed down the misconceptions of the concept talent management.
This paper focus on integrated talent management (ITM). The aim is to provide a conceptual framework on ITM. It helps organizations make better, faster, data-driven decision across the workforce. Translating critical business strategies into enterprise talent investment decisions and execution is possible with ITM. No "piece of the personnel puzzle" operates on its own. Quite to the contrary, it will be better positioned than ever to fit every piece together, creating a singular picture of talent management excellence. It lists out the stages of ITM they are reactive, programmatic, comprehensive, aligned, and strategic. The top 5 steps are mentioned as follows philosophy of talent management, talent management processes, integrated talent management information system, governance structure, and talent management metrics. Workforce planning, recruitment, onboarding, performance/engagement, succession planning learning and development are the areas can be enhanced by ITM. ITM strategies are clearly explained as identifying talent needs, developing talent, acquiring talent, and driving talent performance. Benefits of integrated management are more strategic hiring, improved employee experience, ability to tap into the expertise of partners and access to accurate data drives and smarter business decisions. Interrelating ITM with HR can improve in hiring process, make happier employees and take better business decisions
In this constructive replication, we evaluate the effect of star performers on unit performance beyond the presence of other high performers and high mean levels of unit performance to clarify and confirm stars' unique contribution to unit performance. Furthermore, we extend prior work by assessing stars' moderating effect on the unit turnover‐to‐unit performance relationship. With a sample drawn from Major League Baseball, we confirm that stars have a positive influence on unit performance above and beyond the effects of high levels of mean unit productivity and other high performers, but that the strength of this relationship diminishes as the number of stars increases. We also find that stars moderate the relationship between unit turnover and performance such that star performers effectively eliminate the harmful effects of turnover on unit performance. However, this moderating effect is itself eliminated when the turnover rate changes drastically.
In this article we challenge the assumption that independent professionals (IPros), that is professionals who work as contractors, freelancers, and self‐employed individuals, are not within the remit of talent management (TM) theory and practice. The TM literature is almost exclusively focused on traditional employees and largely ignores the external workforce, even if like IPros, they epitomize high‐value talent. Moreover, much of the TM literature takes an organizational perspective while the individual perspective remains marginal. Advancing the notion of institutional factors in the macro environment suggested by King and Vaiman, we draw on interviews with 52 IPros in two contrasted institutional contexts to provide an agentic view of TM from outside of the standard employment relationship. Our findings reveal the importance of volition, emotional stability, internal locus of control, and self‐efficacy play in IPros effectively managing personal TM strategies. These strategies allow IPros to overcome the empowerment/powerlessness tensions Daubner‐Siva et al. call the “talent paradox.” Importantly, the results do not vary between the two national contexts, suggesting that embracing a “total TM” strategy, attentive to the personal characteristics of talent, regardless of the regulatory issues linked to employment status, will produce superior outcomes for all.
Organizations grapple with how to position and manage star employees within and across workgroups. One critical question not yet well understood is how to optimize the influence of stars on non‐stars and specifically whether to concentrate together or spread out stars across workgroups. Furthermore, we lack knowledge of who is more likely to benefit from stars. To that end, we develop a theoretical model that introduces a new unit‐level concept—group star proportion (GSP)—to progress understanding of how the staffing of stars, within and across workgroups, influences non‐star performance. Invoking theories of vicarious learning, we explicate why GSP has a curvilinear relationship with non‐star performance. Specifically, GSP positively relates to non‐star performance up to a point at which there are diminishing returns. In Study 1, we tested these predictions in a field dataset in a healthcare system. In Study 2, we replicated these findings in a commercial real estate firm and expanded understanding of how GSP may serve as a cross‐level moderator of non‐star performance and two critical individual differences germane to learning: non‐star tenure and trait negative affect. Findings offer theoretical and practical insights into how stars might be of most benefit to their non‐star peers.
Organizational survey data are an important part of workforce analytics for HRD researchers and practitioners. Despite the wealth of research on the business impact of employee attitudes, such as job satisfaction or engagement, there has been relatively little research to help HRD practitioners identify the optimal methods for scoring and reporting survey results. Inspired by customer satisfaction research, this study empirically examines how the use of different metrics for scoring survey responses affects the distributions of work unit engagement scores and relationships with work outcomes. Survey data were gathered from 1,242 work units in a healthcare organization. Results indicate that the choice of scoring method can meaningfully affect the distribution and validity of scores. Metrics based on extremely positive responses (top box and net promoter) were positively skewed and yielded the strongest correlations with performance. Benchmark scores were also positively skewed but did not provide any added criterion‐related validity. In contrast, mean and percent favorable scores were negatively skewed, provided less variability in scores between groups, but equally predicted unit turnover. These results indicate that using top box or net promoter scoring may yield a more normal distribution of group scores while also providing equal to greater predictive validity for performance. However, these results were only observed within a single organization. Further research is needed to determine whether these results can be replicated within different organizational contexts or when using different criterion measures including objective performance measures or patient and customer satisfaction.
At what level is new value created, or, put differently, what is the locus of knowledge? While knowledge and capabilities-based researchers argue that the locus of new value and knowledge lies at the firm level, we challenge this conceptualization and theoretically build toward more individualist foundations. We explicate the underlying philosophical assumptions of extant knowledge and capabilities-based work and discuss attributional problems. Nested (individual-level. a priori) heterogeneity may provide a better explanation of collective heterogeneity.
Most American companies face intense competition, have had to cut costs, and see a continuing need to improve quality and customer service. In response, they have trimmed their work forces and expanded operations overseas. Those companies that rank as human resource leaders have combined downsizing with restructuring, reengineering, employee involvement programs, and team-based work redesigns. They have retrained and redeployed twice as many workers as the human resource laggards, are more apt to sponsor private-public partnerships with schools, offer employees flexible work arrangements, and conduct diversity training and mentoring programs. Neither leaders nor laggards, HR followers are hampered by short-term pressures, indifferent middle management, and other barriers to change; such companies wait for innovations to take hold in their industries. Because HR executives are generally not well-positioned to promote innovation in their companies, the gap between leaders, followers, and laggards, may widen in the years ahead.
As organizations struggle to enhance their competitive positions, employment downsizing continues as a preferred part of a restructuring strategy. Its objective is to reduce operating costs as a way of increasing earnings and stock prices. A study of S&P 500 firms from 1982-2000, however, casts serious doubt on the long-term payoff of this approach. The purpose of this article is to suggest several alternative approaches to restructuring. In contrast to employment downsizing, a strategy that regards people as costs to be cut, a responsible restructuring strategy focuses on people as assets to be developed. This focus recognizes that people are the source of innovation and renewal, especially in knowledge-based organizations, and that the development of new markets, customers, and revenue streams depends on the wise use of a firm's human assets. The article presents company examples and research-based findings that illustrate mistakes to avoid and affirmative steps to take when restructuring responsibly.
Building on research that suggests a negative relationship between repeat collaboration and team creativity, we propose that team mental models developed in earlier projects are likely to interfere with the processes that constitute creative abrasion: idea generation, disclosure/advocacy, and convergence. Suppression of these processes leads to less creative outcomes. We conclude by proposing that these negative effects can be mitigated by process and project charter interventions and by outsider entry into the project team.
Pay dispersion in interdependent work settings is virtually universally argued to be detrimental to performance. We contend, however, that these arguments often confound inequality with inequity, thereby overestimating inequity concerns. Consequently, we adopt a sorting (attraction and retention) perspective to differentiate between pay dispersion that is used to secure valued employee inputs and pay dispersion that is not so used. We find that the former is positively related to interdependent team performance, the latter has no effect or is detrimental, and the approach itself helps to reconcile the pay dispersion literature's disparate results. Curvilinearity tests reveal potential constraints on the sorting argument.
We explore the structure and content of developmental networks depicted in 62
National Baseball Hall of Fame induction speeches to identify which developers and
what support mattered most to inductees’ career achievement. Our analysis illustrates
two new support subfunctions (“freedom and opportunity for skill development” and
“inspiration and motivation”) and shows that first-ballot inductees had larger, more
diverse developmental networks featuring greater multiplexity and more single-function
ties, plus greater supplementary psychosocial and complementary career support
from a wider range of core and peripheral career communities, than later-ballot
inductees. We conclude with a theoretical model of extraordinary career achievement.
Using a resource allocation framework, I propose that the time individuals allocate to organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) may come at the expense of task performance. Because most reward systems favor task performance, individuals may unintentionally hurt their careers by helping the organization. The question then becomes how individuals can engage in OCB and still have positive career outcomes. I explore a number of organizational, situational, and individual variables that may moderate this relationship and suggest implications and future research directions.
The presence of outliers, which are data points that deviate markedly from others, is one of the most enduring and pervasive methodological challenges in organizational science research. We provide evidence that different ways of defining, identifying, and handling outliers alter substantive research conclusions. Then, we report results of a literature review of 46 methodological sources (i.e., journal articles, book chapters, and books) addressing the topic of outliers, as well as 232 organizational science journal articles mentioning issues about outliers. Our literature review uncovered (a) 14 unique and mutually exclusive outlier definitions, 39 outlier identification techniques, and 20 different ways of handling outliers; (b) inconsistencies in how outliers are defined, identified, and handled in various methodological sources; and (c) confusion and lack of transparency in how outliers are addressed by substantive researchers. We offer guidelines, including decision-making trees, that researchers can follow to define, identify, and handle error, interesting, and influential (i.e., model fit and prediction) outliers. Although our emphasis is on regression, structural equation modeling, and multilevel modeling, our general framework forms the basis for a research agenda regarding outliers in the context of other data-analytic approaches. Our recommendations can be used by authors as well as journal editors and reviewers to improve the consistency and transparency of practices regarding the treatment of outliers in organizational science research.
The talent war is a 21st-century reality whereby organizations of all sizes, across all industries, compete to hire and retain scarce human capital. The talent war is fierce because there are few individuals within each industry who are considered top human capital such that there is not enough to go around, and these top performers generate a great deal of revenues, profit, and overall success for their organizations. In this installment of Human Performance, we describe the nature of the talent war and reasons why winning it is crucial for organizational competitiveness, sustainability, and survival. We discuss how implementing a performance management system can help organizations win the talent war by retaining these coveted top performers. Specifically, we offer the following research-based recommendations for using performance management to (1) create and maintain individualized developmental plans; (2) ensure that work is challenging, interesting, and meaningful; (3) provide clear advancement opportunities, and (4) implement contingent rewards. Implementing these recommendations can turn performance management into an effective tool to retain top talent and prevent competitors from stealing a firm's crucial source of competitive advantage.
Monetary rewards can be a very powerful determinant of employee motivation and performance which, in turn, can lead to important returns in terms of firm-level performance. However, monetary rewards do not always lead to these desirable outcomes. We discuss in this installation of Human Performance what monetary rewards can and cannot do, and reasons why, in terms of improving employee performance. Also, we offer research-based recommendations including the following five general principles to guide the design of successful monetary reward systems: (1) define and measure performance accurately, (2) make rewards contingent on performance, (3) reward employees in a timely manner, (4) maintain justice in the reward system, and (5) use monetary and nonmonetary rewards. In addition, we offer specific research-based guidelines for implementing each of the five principles. In short, our article summarizes research-based findings and offers recommendations that will allow managers and other organizational decision makers to understand when and why monetary reward systems are likely to be successful in terms of enhancing employee motivation and performance.
Since the 1991 publication of the first Journal of Management special issue devoted to resource-based inquiry, resource-based theory (RBT) has evolved from a nascent, upstart perspective to one of the most prominent and powerful theories for understanding organizations. Indeed, 20 years after that landmark issue, RBT appears to have reached maturity as a theory. One implication of this maturity is that RBT lies at a critical juncture, one that will be followed either by revitalization of the theory or by its decline. In this introductory article, the authors provide a brief overview of the contributions provided by the commentaries and articles contained in this third Journal of Management special issue on RBT. These contributions center on five themes: interlinkages with other perspectives, processes of resource acquisition and development, the micro-foundations of RBT, RBT and sustainability, and method and measurement issues. Their view is that the commentaries and articles collectively offer a foundation for extending RBT in meaningful new directions and steering clear of decline. They also offer their thoughts about some key opportunities within each of the themes for further revitalizing research involving the RBT.
One of the important events in the development of resource-based theory (RBT) over the past decade has been the call for establishing micro-foundations for RBT. However, the micro-foundations project is still largely an unfulfilled promise. This article clarifies the nature of the micro-foundations project, discusses what it may add in terms of additional explanatory leverage, and specifically addresses micro-foundations in the context of knowledge-based value creation, a key theme in RBT.
There are problems of fit between standard research practices in the domain of turnover research and evolutionary decisional processes like job search. I analyze this problem from methodological, empirical, and conceptual vantage points. Reanalysis of data suggests that the ability to accurately estimate employment opportunity is related to one's temporal positioning within the turnover process. Using cybernetic decision theory as a point of departure, I propose a model conceptualizing employment search processes as a series of decision stages.
In any investigation of a causal relationship between an X and a Y, the time when X and Y are measured is crucial for determining whether X causes Y, as well as the true strength of that relationship. Using past research and a review of current research, we develop a set of XY configurations that describe the main ways that causal relationships are represented in theory and tested in research. We discuss the theoretical. methodological, and analytical issues pertaining to when we measure X and Y and discuss the implications of this analysis for constructing better organizational theories.
A comprehensive meta-analysis of the validity of general mental ability (GMA) measures across 12 occupational categories in the European Community (EC) is presented. GMA measures showed that there is validity generalization and large operational validities for job performance and training success in 11 occupational groups. Results also showed that job complexity moderated the magnitude of the operational validity of GMA tests across three levels of job complexity: low, medium, and high. In general, results were similar to those found in the United States, although the European findings showed a slightly larger magnitude of operational validity in some cases. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings for personnel selection are discussed.
Understanding sources of sustained competitive advantage has become a major area of research in strategic management. Building on the assumptions that strategic resources are heterogeneously distributed across firms and that these differences are stable over time, this article examines the link between firm resources and sustained competitive advantage. Four empirical indicators of the potential of firm resources to generate sustained competitive advantage-value, rareness, imitability, and substitutability are discussed. The model is applied by analyzing the potential of several firm resources for generating sustained competitive advantages. The article concludes by examining implications of this firm resource model of sustained competitive advantage for other business disciplines.
Practicing managers live in a world of extremes, but international business and management research is based on Gaussian statistics that rule out such extremes. On occasion, positive feedback processes among interactive data points cause extreme events characterized by power laws. They seem ubiquitous; we list 80 kinds of them - half each among natural and social phenomena. We use imposed tension and Per Bak's self-organized criticality to argue that Pareto-based science and statistics (based on interdependence, positive feedback, scalability, (nearly) infinite variance, and emphasizing extremes) should parallel the traditional dominance of Gaussian statistics (based on independent data points, finite variance and emphasizing averages). We question quantitative journal publications depending on Gaussian statistics. The cost is inaccurate science and irrelevance to practitioners. In conclusion, no statistical findings should be accepted into business studies if they gain significance via some assumption device by which extreme events and (nearly) infinite variance are ignored. Accordingly, we suggest redirecting international business studies, and management research in general.
We argue that we can reach a better understanding of the relationships between firm resources and competitive advantage by considering actions that firms take against their rivals' resources in factor markets and political markets. We outline market and firm characteristics that facilitate the deployment of competitors' resource-oriented strategies. We then argue that the effectiveness of the firm's actions on its competitors' resources depends on the competitive responses of the rivals being attacked.
Theories of team processes have focused on content and temporal relevance, while largely ignoring implications of structure. We apply social network concepts to propose theory that articulates structural configurations of taskwork and teamwork processes in terms of closure, centralization, and subgrouping. Our theory challenges the conventional view that increases in team processes are inherently and uniformly beneficial and explains how structural configurations involve trade-offs that must be acknowledged in our research and practice.
Corporate entrepreneurship is important for organizational survival, profitability, growth, and renewal. Data from 127 Fortune 500 companies show that executive stock ownership and long-term institutional ownership are positively associated with such entrepreneurship. Conversely, short-term institutional ownership is negatively associated with it, as is a high ratio of outside directors on a company's board. Outside directors' stock ownership somewhat mitigates the latter negative association. Outsiders, including stock owners, might lead companies away from internal product development, the traditional route to corporate entrepreneurship. Finally, an industry's technological opportunities moderate the associations observed between corporate governance and ownership variables and corporate entrepreneurship.
Integrating multilevel theory and the attraction-selection-attrition model, we conceptualized personality homogeneity as human capital emergence containing both composition (aggregate mean) and compilation (aggregate standard deviation) components. Sampling service employees, jobs, and organizations, we analyzed relationships across levels using random coefficient modeling. Individual-, job-, and organizationlevel mean personality were related to job satisfaction and performance. Job- and organization-level variances were frequently negatively related to satisfaction and performance, and job- and organization-level means and variances sometimes interacted. Our results support a multilevel interpretation of the ASA model and suggest human capital manifests multiple structures having different functional consequences across levels.
Intense emotions such as frustration, anger, and dissatisfaction often drive employees to speak up. Yet the very emotions that spur employees to express voice may compromise their ability to do so constructively, preventing managers from reacting favorably. I propose that to speak up frequently and constructively, employees need knowledge about effective strategies for managing emotions. Building on theories of emotion regulation, I develop a theoretical model that explains the role of managing emotions in the incidence and outcomes of voice. In a field study at a health care company, emotion regulation knowledge (1) predicted more frequent voice, (2) mediated by the emotional labor strategies of deep acting and surface acting, and (3) enhanced the contributions of voice to performance evaluations. These results did not generalize to helping behaviors, demonstrating that emotion regulation uniquely affects challenging but not affiliative interpersonal citizenship behaviors. This research introduces emotion regulation as a novel influence on voice and its consequences.
The relationship between interclass pay equity and product quality is examined in a sample of 102 corporate business units. A small pay differential between lower-level employees and upper-echelon managers (after controlling for inputs) is theorized to lead to high product quality by increasing lower-level employees' commitment to top-management goals, effort, and cooperation. Interclass pay equity is determined by comparing the pay and inputs of hourly workers and of lower-level managers and professionals to those of the top three levels of managers. Consistent with the predictions of distributive justice theory, both measures of pay equity are positively related to business-unit product quality.
We used data from 45 production teams (626 individuals) and their supervisors to test hypotheses related to team structure. For teams engaged primarily in conceptual tasks, interdependence exhibited a boolean OR-shaped relationship with team performance, whereas team self-leadership exhibited a positive, linear relationship with performance. For teams engaged primarily in behavioral tasks, we found a boolean AND-shaped relationship between interdependence and performance and a negative, linear relationship between team self-leadership and performance. Intrateam process mediation was found for relationships with interdependence but not for relationships with team self-leadership. Overall, findings support a model of team structure and illustrate how relationships between structural characteristics and a team's performance can be moderated by its tasks.
Structural explanations of the production of inequality in organizations often mimic economics in their choice of both variables and theoretical accounts. The "new structuralism" typically has neglected important social psychological processes such as social comparison, categorization, and interpersonal attraction and affiliation. This paper illustrates how some basic social psychological tenets can substantially enrich the analysis of the division of labor in organizations, the assignment of wages to positions, and the process through which individuals are matched with work roles.
Using a large sample of college and university faculty, we studied the effects of wage inequality on satisfaction, productivity, and collaboration. Results show that the greater the degree of wage dispersion within academic departments, the lower is individual faculty members' satisfaction and research productivity and the less likely it is that faculty members will collaborate on research. The negative effects of wage dispersion on satisfaction are reduced for people who are more committed (have longer tenure), in fields with more developed scientific paradigms, and when salaries are based more on experience and scholarly productivity, but they are greater for those who earn comparatively less money. Wage dispersion has a smaller negative effect on satisfaction in private colleges and universities in which salaries are less likely to be known. The results suggest that one's position in the salary structure, the availability of information about wage inequality, and legitimate bases of reward allocation all affect the extent to which wage dispersion produces adverse effects.
The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, from which this article is excerpted, is based on the author's field work at "Amerco," the fictitious name for a Fortune 500 company headquartered in the midwestern town of "Spotted Deer." It describes how employees at all levels of the corporation have handled the conflicting demands of family life and the workplace. This article demonstrates that even though Amerco has "family-friendly" policies, relatively few employees take advantage of them. Many appear to want to spend more time not at home but at the office.
The leading introductory book on data mining, fully updated and revised!When Berry and Linoff wrote the first edition of Data Mining Techniques in the late 1990s, data mining was just starting to move out of the lab and into the office and has since grown to become an indispensable tool of modern business. This new edition—more than 50% new and revised— is a significant update from the previous one, and shows you how to harness the newest data mining methods and techniques to solve common business problems. The duo of unparalleled authors share invaluable advice for improving response rates to direct marketing campaigns, identifying new customer segments, and estimating credit risk. In addition, they cover more advanced topics such as preparing data for analysis and creating the necessary infrastructure for data mining at your company. Features significant updates since the previous edition and updates you on best practices for using data mining methods and techniques for solving common business problemsCovers a new data mining technique in every chapter along with clear, concise explanations on how to apply each technique immediatelyTouches on core data mining techniques, including decision trees, neural networks, collaborative filtering, association rules, link analysis, survival analysis, and moreProvides best practices for performing data mining using simple tools such as ExcelData Mining Techniques, Third Edition covers a new data mining technique with each successive chapter and then demonstrates how you can apply that technique for improved marketing, sales, and customer support to get immediate results.
Idiosyncratic employment arrangements (i-deals) stand to benefit the individual employee as well as his or her employer. However, unless certain conditions apply, coworkers may respond negatively to these arrangements. We distinguish functional i-deals from their dysfunctional counterparts and highlight evidence of i-deals in previous organizational research. We develop propositions specifying both how i-deals are formed and how they impact workers and coworkers. Finally, we outline the implications i-deals have for research and for managing contemporary employment relationships.
We revisit a long‐held assumption in human resource management, organizational behavior, and industrial and organizational psychology that individual performance follows a Gaussian (normal) distribution. We conducted 5 studies involving 198 samples including 633,263 researchers, entertainers, politicians, and amateur and professional athletes. Results are remarkably consistent across industries, types of jobs, types of performance measures, and time frames and indicate that individual performance is not normally distributed—instead, it follows a Paretian (power law) distribution. Assuming normality of individual performance can lead to misspecified theories and misleading practices. Thus, our results have implications for all theories and applications that directly or indirectly address the performance of individual workers including performance measurement and management, utility analysis in preemployment testing and training and development, personnel selection, leadership, and the prediction of performance, among others.
Building on recent arguments advocating the benefits of different types of employment flexibility, we examine the relationships among the four types of employment (knowledge-based, job-based, contract, and alliances) and firm performance. The results indicate that a greater use of knowledge-based employment and contract work is positively associated with firm performance. The results also indicate that both knowledge-based employment and contract work positively interact with job-based employment to impact firm performance. In addition, the relationships between knowledge-based employment and firm performance, as well as between job-based employment and firm performance, vary across levels of technological intensity.
This article offers a new approach to the conceptualization of the human capital resource by developing a multilevel model connecting micro, intermediate, and macro levels of scholarship. We define human capital as a unit-level resource that is created from the emergence of individuals' knowledge, skills, abilities, or other characteristics. The model provides new insights into how strategically valuable human capital resources have their origins in the psychological attributes of individuals and are transformed through unit-level processes.
The use of Bayesian methods for data analysis is creating a revolution in fields ranging from genetics to marketing. Yet, results of our literature review, including more than 10,000 articles published in 15 journals from January 2001 and December 2010, indicate that Bayesian approaches are essentially absent from the organizational sciences. Our article introduces organizational science researchers to Bayesian methods and describes why and how they should be used. We use multiple linear regression as the framework to offer a step-by-step demonstration, including the use of software, regarding how to implement Bayesian methods. We explain and illustrate how to determine the prior distribution, compute the posterior distribution, possibly accept the null value, and produce a write-up describing the entire Bayesian process, including graphs, results, and their interpretation. We also offer a summary of the advantages of using Bayesian analysis and examples of how specific published research based on frequentist analysis-based approaches failed to benefit from the advantages offered by a Bayesian approach and how using Bayesian analyses would have led to richer and, in some cases, different substantive conclusions. We hope that our article will serve as a catalyst for the adoption of Bayesian methods in organizational science research.
A growing body of empirical evidence in the management literature suggests that antecedent variables widely accepted as leading to desirable consequences actually lead to negative outcomes. These increasingly pervasive and often countertheoretical findings permeate levels of analysis (i.e., from micro to macro) and management subfields (e.g., organizational behavior, strategic management). Although seemingly unrelated, the authors contend that this body of empirical research can be accounted for by a meta-theoretical principle they call the too-much-of-a-good-thing effect (TMGT effect). The authors posit that, due to the TMGT effect, all seemingly monotonic positive relations reach context-specific inflection points after which the relations turn asymptotic and often negative, resulting in an overall pattern of curvilinearity. They illustrate how the TMGT effect provides a meta-theoretical explanation for a host of seemingly puzzling results in key areas of organizational behavior (e.g., leadership, personality), human resource management (e.g., job design, personnel selection), entrepreneurship (e.g., new venture planning, firm growth rate), and strategic management (e.g., diversification, organizational slack). Finally, the authors discuss implications of the TMGT effect for theory development, theory testing, and management practice.
Entrepreneurship is the process by which firms notice opportunities and act (by creatively organizing transactions between factors of production) to create surplus value. Using concepts from information and agency theory, this article examines how agency problems affect the dynamics of internal corporate entrepreneurship and the level of entrepreneurial behavior The relationship between internal corporate and external entrepreneurship is explored, and the organizationalfactors that cause agency problems are examined. Finally, solutions to agency problems are suggested that also promote internal corporate entrepreneurship.
This paper offers direct evidence of the role of managerial talent in the market for CEOs. Using a newly hand-collected sample of 2,055 CEO turnovers between 1993 and 2005, we construct several empirical measures of CEO superstar status based on CEOs' financial press visibility and ability to pursue aggressive growth strategies. We document that: 1) turnover rates are higher among superstar CEOs, especially after adverse firm-specific and market-wide shocks; 2) appointment announcements of superstar CEOs are associated with significantly positive average abnormal stock returns, and the positive relation between announcement returns and CEO superstar status is significantly stronger for outside successions; 3) first-year total pay is an increasing and convex function of CEO superstar status, and increasingly so for outside successions. These results are strongly consistent with a model of optimal executive pay and turnover based on competition in the CEO labor market, but inconsistent with alternative explanations such as CEO power.
Numerous scholars have documented a dramatic transformation taking place in the relationship between employers and employees. Job security and career ladders are being replaced with a doctrine of employability. In exchange for loyalty and hard work, firms are promising to keep employees' skills current and develop them for opportunities in other workplaces. To meet these changing needs, labour market intermediaries such as temporary help firms and employee leasing organizations have emerged to mediate the relationship between firms and the spot labour market. Companies are also forming collaborative relationships, termed ‘HR alliances’ with other firms to manage their human resources. These take the form of employee-sharing relationships, training and development partnerships and ‘quasi-internal labour markets’ where employees are trained and work in one firm then permanently ‘promoted’ to a position of higher responsibility in a partner firm. In this theoretical paper, I explore the types of employees likely to be managed using an HR alliance, factors that influence firms' use of such alliances, and factors that influence firms' choice of collaboration partners. The paper concludes with a proposal of potential qualitative and quantitative research to study this phenomenon.
One of the most critical challenges faced by management scholars is how to integrate micro and macro research methods and theories. This article introduces a special issue of the Journal of Management addressing this integration challenge. First, the authors describe the nature of the micro—macro divide and its challenge for the field of management. Second, the authors provide a summary of each of the four guest editorials and seven articles published in the special issue and how each piece, in its own unique way and adopting a different perspective, makes a novel contribution toward addressing this challenge. Finally, they offer suggestions for future research that they hope will stimulate greater integration of management research with the goal of bridging not only the micro—macro gap but also the science—practice gap.