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We initiated a conversation between two prominent scholars in the field of employee mobility who come from different disciplinary backgrounds: Rajshree Agarwal (from the human capital research tradition) and Matthew Bidwell (from the human resource management research tradition). Their cumulative work leads to vastly different conclusions. In this chapter we had an opportunity to explore their differences and share the roots of their motivations, interests, and research philosophies. The discussion provides diverging, yet insightful, directions for future research.

The past few decades have witnessed a phenomenal progress in our understanding of employee mobility as a critical driver and consequence of various outcomes for individuals, organizations, industries, and economies. In the process, researchers have tackled several important issues in conducting empirical research on employee mobility. This chapter provides a critical discussion of the extant literature focusing on five broad areas: identification of mobility, timing of mobility, outcomes of mobility and their operationalization, model identification, and other related issues. In doing so, this article identifies some of the empirical choices and methodologies adopted in prior mobility studies, evaluates those practices, and suggests areas of improvements for the practice. It is hoped that future studies will benefit from this chapter's insight by building on the best practices from the literature while continuously and successfully tackling the issues that have been challenging the researchers on this increasingly important topic of scholarly inquiry.

Research on employee mobility has proliferated in the past four decades across four research traditions: Economics, sociology, management, and organizational behavior/human resource management. Despite significant overlap in interest and focus, these four streams of research have evolved independent from each other, resulting in a structural divide. We provide a detailed account of the research on employee mobility and the structural divide across disciplines. We document that the payoff from this profusion of research and increasing interest has been disappointing, as reflected in the limited number of cross-disciplinary citations, even among common topics of interest. However, our analysis also provides some encouraging signs in the form of specific journals and individuals who provide a bridge for cross-disciplinary fertilization.

This chapter argues that intra-firm geographic mobility is an understudied mechanism that can help mitigate coordination failures in a geographically distributed organization. The chapter presents an organizing framework on how intra-firm geographic mobility creates value for firms and discusses how intra-firm geographic mobility can create value for individual workers. The chapter concludes by presenting a future research agenda for intra-firm geographic mobility in light of emerging phenomena such as global collaborative patenting by multinationals, temporary colocation of knowledge workers, and nonstandard work.

How is the performance of a knowledge worker affected by the departure of a colleague? While prior research has highlighted the aggregate impact of knowledge worker mobility on firms, in this chapter we look inside the firm, to explore the individual-level impact of a coworker's departure on the performance of a remaining employee. We propose that the departure of a coworker can change the remaining employee's access to knowledge, but the implications of such changes will depend on the nature of the coworker's relationship with the employee: the employee's performance will be negatively affected to the extent that the relationship is collaborative, but it will be positively affected to the extent that the relationship is competitive. Moreover, these effects will be magnified to the extent that the employee was dependent on the coworker for knowledge access prior to the move, but weakened to the extent that the relationship persists after the move. Our knowledge-based perspective on coworker departures advances research on employee mobility and knowledge flows by highlighting the variety of changes in knowledge access that may result when a colleague leaves the firm, and illuminating the implications of these changes for the performance of employees who remain behind.

Prior research suggests that patents by mobile inventors are at higher risk of generating spillovers between departed and hiring firms. Despite extensive research on how inter-firm inventor mobility affects firms' learning and innovation, little is known about how firms protect their existing intellectual property in the face of inter-firm inventor mobility. We argue that one main way in which firms try to prevent others from appropriating the value of these inventions is by extending the validity of mobile inventors' patents. We derive a set of hypotheses consistent with this argument and test them using longitudinal data on four major American semiconductor firms. Our analyses show that, as hypothesized, both departed and hiring firms are more likely to extend the validity of mobile inventors' patents than is the case for the patents of other, non-mobile inventors. Furthermore, in line with the view that firms use patent renewal to deter other firms from appropriating mobile inventors' knowledge, we find this effect to be stronger where the risks of spillovers are most intense. Our findings extend prior literature by explicating the role of patent renewal as a strategic deterrent against intellectual property appropriation in the face of inter-firm inventor mobility.