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Firm-specific human capital (FSHC) has been an integral part of the vocabulary in the strategy field. Many scholars argue that FSHC inhibits employee mobility and drives employee retention at a discount, value appropriation, and firms' competitive advantage. FSHC also plays a central role in the resource-based view of the firm. In recent years, however, a significant debate has emerged on the validity and usefulness of the construct. The purpose of the chapter is to revisit this debate and discuss both challenges and opportunities related to FSHC. In a form of conversation, we take aim at FSHC from different angles and discuss its role as a mobility friction, in value appropriation of established firms, in the context of transitions between paid employment and entrepreneurship, and in the views of practitioners. While we agree that our understanding of the concept of FSHC must evolve, we continue to see its value in our theoretical toolbox.

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.

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.

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.

In the context of worker–firm complementarities, the extant literature has focused primarily on worker–firm dyads that generate additional revenue for the firm. However, we extend the study of worker–firm complementarities by examining matches that create value through the generation of additional nonpecuniary utility for employees. Through this lens, we hypothesize that mobile employees will receive lower wages to offset the benefits they receive from these nonpecuniary complementarities. Further, we hypothesize that star employees who create unique revenue-generating complementarities receive higher wages than otherwise predicted as they can capture a share of the additional revenue they generate. We test this conceptualization using panel data on all US National Basketball Association players from 2000 to 2009. We demonstrate that NBA players accept lower than predicted wages to play for their home teams which reflects worker utility-generating complementarities. We also show that superstars receive higher than predicted wages to play for their home teams, consistent with firm revenue-generating complementarities.