Sink or Swim: The Role of Workplace Context in Shaping Career Advancement and Human-Capital Development

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Chattopadhyay, Shinjinee; Choudhury, Prithwiraj
• 署名单位: University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Harvard University
• 刊物名称: ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1047-7039
• DOI: 10.1287/orsc.2017.1115
• 发表日期: 2017
• 页码: 211-227
• 关键词: location; workplace context; CAREER ADVANCEMENT; performance; individuals; promotion; crucible experiences; motivation; internal mobility; human capital development; microfoundations; BEHAVIOR

摘要

We develop and test predictions on howearly career challenges arising from the workplace context affect short-and long-term career advancement of individuals. Typically an organization's decision to deploy a manager to one of several possible contexts is endogenous to unobservable factors, and selection makes it challenging to disentangle the effect of workplace context on individual career advancement. We work around this problem by studying an organization, the Indian Administrative Services, which deploys entry-level managers quasirandomly across India. We find that managers deployed to more challenging contexts early in their careers experience faster career advancement in the short term. We present suggestive evidence that this is because challenging contexts provide managers more opportunities to develop skills (crucible experiences), and a greater motivation to relocate out of the challenging context. We also find that managers deployed to a challenging context early in their careers continue to experience faster advancement in the long term, suggesting that initial deployment to a challenging context is associated with human capital development. Managers initially deployed to more challenging contexts were not, however, more likely to break into the upper echelons of the organization.