Cross-Organization Collaboration and Mobility of Knowledge Workers

Abstract

Through the lens of labor market friction logic, we theorize that knowledge workers’ experiences on cross-organization teams affect employee mobility patterns and shape post-mobility employee performance. Additionally, we theorize that employee ability positively moderates both these relationships. We test our theory in the context of academic scientists because these knowledge workers may be part of collaborations both within their current organization and across multiple organizations. We find that cross-organization collaboration enhances knowledge worker mobility and moving to collaborators is associated with greater post-mobility employee performance. We find that employee ability positively moderates the effect of moving to collaborators. The results suggest that cross-organization collaboration reduces labor market frictions and enhances the quality of employee-employer matches, particularly for high ability individuals.

Keywords: human capital, knowledge workers, employee mobility, knowledge flow, market frictions