Harnessing Worker Inexperience for Career Advancement

Abstract

Will workers always achieve the most career advancement through projects with the highest ex-ante promise? We provide a simple model and show evidence that for inexperienced workers, this may not be the case. In contexts such as the creative industries, each project’s prospects are notoriously difficult to assess ex ante, and thus organizations often try them out, or “experiment” them, before fully committing to or abandoning them. In such situations, inexperienced workers paired with projects judged ex ante lower quality may achieve greater career advancement than if they are paired with ex ante higher quality projects. This is because inexperienced workers may be more likely to induce unlikely outcomes, providing the ex ante lowest-ranked projects with the improbable upside necessary to achieve commitment after experimentation. We find evidence in support of our theory in the US television programming industry, where experimented (i.e., piloted) programs with first-time lead actors fared better when those programs were judged ex ante as lower quality than when those programs were ex ante judged as higher quality, with the reverse being the case for experienced lead actors.

Keywords: innovation, real options, staged development, career, labor, experimentation