Career Paths: New Insights into the Types, Causes, and Consequences of Career Mobility between Firms

Career mobility between organizations is a critical topic in organizational behavior and organization theory, as it can influence individuals’ work lives, attainment, and overall well-being, play an important role in a variety of organizational processes and outcomes, and be a potential remedy to social inequality for members of disadvantaged groups. However, research has not kept pace with the types of inter-firm mobility that now define careers and the causes and consequences of that mobility. The five papers in this presenter symposium each empirically examine a different type of career mobility, different drivers of career mobility or its consequences, and career mobility for workers in different professions. The first paper examines how both positive and negative past job application experiences in an online application platform shape female freelancers’ perceptions of jobs, influencing their job search decisions. The second paper investigates how the work roles of individuals in high-end fashion industry shape their identities, and affect their likelihood of founding a new firm. The third paper uses data on the careers of patent attorneys to conduct a detailed examination of what individual and organizational factors influence career mobility of professionals across different sides of markets, from professional-service providers to client firms. The fourth paper examines the career mobility of professional musicians as a consequence of record labels changing their market identities by releasing records in new music genres. Finally, the fifth paper investigates the effects of career mobility of boomerang workers, professionals who return to an organization for which they previously worked, on their helping behavior. Collectively these papers advance our understanding of inter-firm career mobility by encouraging communication between scholars about the complexity of career mobility and the many factors that influence its causes and consequences. Leaning In or Leaning Out? How Previous Job Experiences Shape Womens Decision for Job Application Presenter: Tiantian Yang; Duke U. Presenter: Ming De Leung; U. of California, Riverside Presenter: Jiayi Bao; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania New TitleTurning Roles into Identities: The Transition to Entrepreneurship in High-End Fashion Presenter: Frederic Clement Godart; INSEAD Presenter: Kim Claes; Sungkyunkwan U. Presenter: Stanislav D. Dobrev; U. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Boundary-less Careers across the Industry Boundary: Career Paths between Service and Client Firms Presenter: JR Keller; Cornell U. Presenter: Deepak Somaya; U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Presenter: Shinjae Won; U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Dont Go Changing to Try and Please Me: The Mobility of Artists When Record Labels Add Music Genre Presenter: Eugene Taeha Paik; U. of Mississippi Presenter: Joseph P. Broschak; U. of Arizona You Cant Go Home Again: Returning Employees and Bi-lateral Helping Behavior Presenter: Thorsten Grohsjean; Bocconi U. Presenter: Gina Dokko; U. of California, Davis