EMPLOYEE MOBILITY AND INNOVATION: THE ROLE OF TURNOVER RATE AND NETWORK CENTRALITY

Innovation is crucial to a company’s competitive advantage and employees play an important role in generating innovation within a company. Based on social capital theory, we proposed a new type of social network: the employee mobility network, and explored the impact of employee mobility on innovation. Specifically, we examined the role of both employee turnover rate, and an organisation’s centrality in the employee mobility network in predicting innovation. We collected data from World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), Talentale, and Forbes Global 2000 to test our hypotheses. The results showed that turnover rate had a significantly inverted-U curve relationship with innovation, and both degree and closeness centralities of an organisation in the employee mobility network had a significant positive relationship with innovation. Based on the results, we suggest that companies should find a balanced value for their turnover rate to get the highest return in innovation. Also, we suggest that companies should improve social influence in employee mobility networks in order to attract talent and increase company innovation.

Living It Up at the Hotel California: Employee Mobility Barriers and Collaborativeness in Firms’ Innovation

Research has long recognized the importance of collaboration for innovation, but relatively little is known about the strategic drivers of collaborative innovation in firms. We posit that robust collaboration within firms can increase the interfirm mobility of inventors and increase spillovers of innovative knowledge to competitors by mobile inventors. Therefore, by mitigating these value capture hazards associated with collaboration, barriers to employee mobility may induce firms to increase collaborativeness in innovation. Additionally, consistent with the mechanism underlying this proposition, we hypothesize that firms whose innovation entails more complex knowledge, which is known to impede interfirm knowledge spillovers, will increase collaboration less when employee mobility increases. We test these hypotheses by leveraging quasi-exogenous changes in two legal mobility barriers for inventors across U.S. states and find that higher-mobility barriers are associated with greater inventor collaboration (as observed in patented innovation), and this effect is weaker for firms possessing more complex knowledge. These findings deepen our understanding of the strategic tradeoffs between value creation and value capture entailed in collaborative innovation within firms and of human capital strategies that help to manage these tradeoffs.

The Epidemic of Mental Disorders in Business—How Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Spread across Organizations through Employee Mobility

Combining management research with infectious disease epidemiology, we propose a new perspective on mental disorders in a business context. We suggest that—similar to infectious diseases—clinical diagnoses of depression, anxiety, and stress-related disorders can spread epidemically across the boundaries of organizations via social contagion. We propose a framework for assessing the patterns of disease transmission, with employee mobility as the driver of contagion across organizations. We empirically test the proposed mental disorder transmission patterns by observing more than 250,000 employees and more than 17,000 Danish firms over a period of 12 years. Our findings reveal that when organizations hire employees from other, unhealthy organizations (those with a high prevalence of mental disorders), they “implant” depression, anxiety, and stress-related disorders into their workforces. Employees leaving unhealthy organizations act as “carriers” of these disorders regardless of whether they themselves have received a formal diagnosis of a mental disorder. The effect is especially pronounced if the newcomer holds a managerial position.

Do Managers’ Affiliation Ties Have a Negative Relationship with Subordinates’ Interfirm Mobility? Evidence from Large U.S. Law Firms

We hypothesize that employee mobility between organizations will be lower when the organizations’ managers share affiliation ties. We test this idea by examining interorganizational employee mobility between large corporate law practices. We find that a practice area is less likely to hire attorneys from a rival practice area when the leaders of the two practice areas attended the same law school at the same time, our proxy for the presence of an affiliation tie. The negative relationship is stronger for hiring higher-ranked attorneys, and it is driven by practice leaders from the same law school class. Exploiting appointments of new practice leaders, we find a sharp and immediate decline in interorganizational mobility following an appointment that creates an affiliation tie between the leadership of the practice areas. Although we cannot rule out the possibility that job seekers’ preferences drive the results, we conclude that rival managers’ ties deserve further scrutiny because they might limit the outside employment opportunities of their subordinates.

Utilization of RFID Technology in the Employee Mobility System of the Inspectorate Office of Merauke Regency

The Inspectorate of Merauke Regency has a role as an internal supervisory agency for the implementation of government in Merauke Regency. Mobility in the office has not been supported by an entry and exit permit book for employees during working hours. The impact is a lack of employee attendance information. In addition, the process of calculating the percentage of active working time also experiences problems because it is done conventionally. To solve this problem, an employee mobility system was designed in the office by utilizing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. The system was built using the prototyping method. The design of mobility devices using a limited microcontroller in the form of a prototype. Presentation of data and information from the prototype recording is displayed on a website. The website is built using PHP and javascript programming languages. The results of the study led to a new innovation in monitoring the attendance of employees at the office during working hours by the Receptionist Department. The results of this study are also able to present the calculation of earning an allowance called Tunjangan Khusus Pengawasan Daerah (TKPD) for employees in the form of a percentage of mobility activity during active working hours.