Left Behind? Understanding the Career Consequences of Collaborator Exits

• Published in: Academy of Management journal 2024-04, Vol.67 (2), p.526-553
• Main Author: Anderson, Tracy
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Career development planning; Careers; Colleagues; Competency based learning; Employee promotions; Employees; Interdependence; Job openings; Mobility; Occupational mobility; Vacancies
• ISSN: 0001-4273; 1948-0989
• DOI: 10.5465/amj.2022.0623

Prior research on career interdependence has focused on how colleague exits shape employees' intraorganizational careers through the creation of job vacancies and vacancy-driven promotion. In this paper, I propose that colleague exits can shape employees' careers through the creation of valuable relational "vacancies." Focusing on employees engaged in collaborative research, and drawing on the vacancy chains literature, I argue that colleague exits create new collaboration opportunities for remaining employees that can enhance learning and facilitate competency-driven promotion. Yet, employees will benefit only when these opportunities arise as a result of their own collaborators leaving-that is, employees must lose to gain. Using longitudinal data on employees within a single research organization, I show that collaborator exits increase the likelihood of employees' competency-driven promotion in a way that noncollaborator exits do not. Furthermore, it is the exit of higher-level collaborators that is most beneficial. These findings highlight a different type of career interdependence and the role of collaborator mobility in shaping the intraorganizational careers of knowledge workers.