The antecedents and performance consequences of employee mobility

"The objective of this proposal is to help initiate and develop a research project focusing on understanding the dynamics of employee mobility across organizations. This topic is key to our understanding of firm performance given the importance of the human and social capital carried by employees (Coff 1997). Clearly, this topic is relevant to academic researchers but also to policy makers as the design of labour market institutions has implications for the incidence and direction of employee mobility (Marx et al. 2009). Besides that, this topic is relevant to managers as a better understanding of employee mobility will help them design human resources strategies with a view to protecting firm talent (Agarwal et al. 2009).
While the topic of employee mobility is broad, we will focus specifically on a phenomenon called co-mobility, that is the phenomenon where the move of one employee results in other employees from the same firm moving as well (Marx and Timmermans 2017). This is an interesting angle to explore as the relationships developed while working together can impact subsequent decisions of employment. However, the extant literature has primarily focused on the performance consequences of co-mobility for the individual employees. We know less, however, about the antecedents of co-mobility and its broader impact on firm performance.
Hence, the goals of this project are a) to develop theory that explains the emergence of co-mobility, b) provide data that document this phenomenon and explain its antecedents and, c) develop theory and empirically test the effects of co-mobility on firm performance. "