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We explore how absolute and relative incomes affect an individual's propensity to start a new business as a pure or hybrid entrepreneur. Using a sample of 12,686 individuals from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 cohort (NLSY79) in our empirical analyses, we find that individuals with high absolute income are generally less likely to engage in entrepreneurship. However, once absolute income is controlled, those with above-average relative income are more likely to become an entrepreneur, particularly in pure form as opposed to a hybrid one. Our findings provide more nuanced understanding on the differences between absolute and relative income levels influencing an individual's decision to become an entrepreneur, and if so, whether to engage in pure or hybrid form.

This chapter provides a briefly summary of the main message and contribution of Martin C. Goossen's and Gianluca Carnabuci's paper “When Employees Walk Out the Door, Their Memories Remain: The Effect of Inventor Mobility on Patent Renewal”. It situates the paper and its contribution in the broader literature and provides critical areas and possible avenues for future research.

Responding to Coff et al.’s “Firm-specific Human Capital at the Crossroads,” this commentary proposes three avenues for further research on firm-specific human capital: the impact on firm performance of new employee-incumbent employee interaction; the impact of variation in firm-specific human capital on the prevalence and success of spinoffs; and the intersection of research on firm-specific human capital and management pedagogy.

The purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of the mechanisms associated with learning-by-hiring.

The authors built a yearly dyad data structure of all of the hiring and sourcing firms in the US biotechnology sector between 1973 and 1999.

The authors found that hiring firm’s learning from a prior employer’s knowledge is limited in scope to the knowledge developed by the newly hired inventor, and could be attributed to new hire direct involvement. Learning from new recruit occurred only when incumbent inventors collaborate intensively with the hired inventor. Accordingly, what might seem like learning-by-hiring may result in hiring to avoid learning, unless the organization creates the social structures that facilitate the exchange of knowledge within and throughout the organization.

The results, thus, highlight the importance of aligning a firm’s social environment with its strategic goal to learn from its external competitors.

Recruitment is one means by which organizations can interact with and learn from their external environment. Incumbent inventors are more likely to learn from hired inventor knowledge through the development of a collaborative social culture that facilitates communication and trust in the process of transferring knowledge among individuals. The results, thus, highlight the importance of aligning a firm’s internal environment with its strategic goal to learn from its external competitors.

The authors suggest that access to new knowledge bases through hiring is not sufficient for learning purposes; internalizing a new hire’s knowledge also requires the internal mechanisms, structures, and cultures that motivate knowledge sharing and promote mutual trust.

This chapter investigates the relationship between the composition of initial spinout teams and spinout survival. We develop a theory suggesting that spinout founders hiring from their prior firm versus hiring from the external labor market to assemble spinout teams will have differential effects on spinout survival. Using confidential employee–employer linked data in the legal services industry provided by the United States Census Bureau, we find evidence that inclusion of spinout team members from the founder's prior firm is positively related to spinout survival, a relationship which increases with included members' prior earnings. In contrast, we find that inclusion of spinout team members from firms outside the founder's prior firm is positively associated with spinout failure, a relationship which becomes statistically insignificant when included team members' prior earnings are high. Taken together, our results point to the potential hazards associated with using external markets to assemble spinout teams, thereby establishing an important boundary condition for extant theory which has focused on the benefits associated with spinout team size, but has often neglected the labor market strategy through which such teams are assembled.

Using data from a top-five global executive placement firm, the authors explore how an organization's financial misconduct may affect pay for former employees not implicated in wrongdoing. Drawing on stigma theory, they hypothesize that although such alumni did not participate in the financial misconduct and they had left the organization years before the misconduct, these alumni experience a compensation penalty. The stigma effect increases in relation to the job function proximity to the misconduct, recency of the misconduct, and an employee's seniority. Collectively, results suggest that the stigma of financial misconduct could reach alumni employees and need not be confined to executives and directors that oversaw the organization during the misconduct.

This study explores some important aspects of organisational career management (OCM) in Israel. Overall, our data, obtained from 136 large firms, represented by their human resource managers (HRMs), reflect a fairly paternalistic approach to career management; careers are mostly managed by the organisation. Specifically, we also found that: 1. For making promotion decisions HRMs tend to rely on particularistic criteria and evaluations programs; 2. For managing promotion HRMs rely on internal HR development programs; and 3. Because upward mobility opportunities are limited, many opt for external labour markets to acquire managerial talent. Implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.

Mobility processes, the routines that organizations use to move employees into and across jobs, are a critical determinant of the way that human capital is allocated within organizations and careers developed. Most existing work on these mobility processes has examined processes in which mobility is tightly coupled to the filling of vacancies. There is substantial evidence, though, that many organizations adopt very different processes for managing mobility. In this theory chapter, I compare vacancy-based, “job-pull” systems with alternative, “person-push” systems in which mobility is keyed to employees' attainment of performance and skill thresholds to explain how and why mobility processes vary. I identify two, inter-related dimensions along which mobility processes vary: whether their decision processes emphasize the need to match employees to tasks versus providing predictable rewards; and whether the system of jobs that people move between prioritizes flexibility or control of agency costs. I use these dimensions to predict when organizations will adopt different mobility processes, and how those processes will affect employees' mobility.