Startup Size and the Mechanisms of External Learning: Increasing Opportunity and Decreasing Ability?

An important area of investigation in the field of entrepreneurship examines how people and organizations exploit technological opportunities. Prior research suggests that alliances, the mobility of experts, and the informal mechanisms associated with geographic co-location can present firms with useful opportunities to source technological knowledge. This paper uses insights from strategic management and organizational theory to suggest that organizational size may have an important impact on the extent of external learning, since it differentially affects the likelihood of learning via formal and informal mechanisms. Examining a cross-section of semiconductor startups, we find that external learning increases with startup size. With regard to the specific mechanisms of learning, we find that firms learn from alliances regardless of their size. For the informal mechanisms of mobility and geographic co-location, however, learning decreases with firm size. These results suggest that as startups grow, they may have increasing opportunities to access and exploit external knowledge, but their motivation (and hence ability) to learn from more informal sources may decrease

Career Resourcing and the Process of Professional Emergence

We theorize a career resourcing process that explains how individuals can create a new profession. Using historical archives, we trace the emergence of health services research as a new research profession through the career actions of early practitioners. We find that career resourcing can lead to the institutionalization of a new profession by: 1) a process of accretion, where people pursuing fulfilling careers generate resources that contribute to institutionalization, or 2) institutional work to deliberately build the professional community and infrastructure. We contribute to research on institutional change by specifying career actions that can lead to the institutionalization of a new profession, and by developing theory that accounts for the motivations and the means of individuals to act in ways that result in the institutionalization of a new profession

What you know or who you know? Human capital and social capital as determinants of individual performance

Is it who you know or what you know that helps you perform at work? Substantial bodies of research suggest that social capital and human capital are each important resources for getting ahead. Further, social and human capital operate at the same time and interact with each other, yet very few studies explicitly examine the two together, and those that do have conflicting findings. In this study, I argue that the inconsistency in findings results from of lack of conceptual clarity around the mechanisms underlying social and human capital. I highlight similarities and differences in the resources comprising social and human capital, and I focus on resource heterogeneity as an important common mechanism. By concentrating attention on heterogeneity from both human and social sources, I can examine some of the ways the underlying resources interact and test for joint effects. In addition, I focus on the outcome of job performance; an important intermediate outcome between social and human capital resources and the more commonly studied outcomes like wages or promotions. To address these issues, I conducted a field study of productivity and innovative performance of Claims Adjusters in a major U.S. insurance firm. I find that work experience heterogeneity has a positive relationship with innovativeness, but a negative relationship with productivity. In contrast, social network heterogeneity is a more adaptable resource that contributes to both aspects of performance. However, there are differences in contributions of different forms of social network heterogeneity. The content of social ties drives the positive effect for innovativeness, while the positive effect on productivity is driven by the characteristics of the network contacts. I also find that human and social resources, when defined in terms of heterogeneity, interact in a negative way with respect to job performance: that their usefulness overlaps

What you know or who you know? Human capital and social capital as determinants of individual performance

Is it who you know or what you know that helps you perform at work? Substantial bodies of research suggest that social capital and human capital are each important resources for getting ahead. Further, social and human capital operate at the same time and interact with each other, yet very few studies explicitly examine the two together, and those that do have conflicting findings. In this study, I argue that the inconsistency in findings results from of lack of conceptual clarity around the mechanisms underlying social and human capital. I highlight similarities and differences in the resources comprising social and human capital, and I focus on resource heterogeneity as an important common mechanism. By concentrating attention on heterogeneity from both human and social sources, I can examine some of the ways the underlying resources interact and test for joint effects. In addition, I focus on the outcome of job performance; an important intermediate outcome between social and human capital resources and the more commonly studied outcomes like wages or promotions. To address these issues, I conducted a field study of productivity and innovative performance of Claims Adjusters in a major U.S. insurance firm. I find that work experience heterogeneity has a positive relationship with innovativeness, but a negative relationship with productivity. In contrast, social network heterogeneity is a more adaptable resource that contributes to both aspects of performance. However, there are differences in contributions of different forms of social network heterogeneity. The content of social ties drives the positive effect for innovativeness, while the positive effect on productivity is driven by the characteristics of the network contacts. I also find that human and social resources, when defined in terms of heterogeneity, interact in a negative way with respect to job performance: that their usefulness overlaps

Stable Anchors and Dynamic Evolution: A Paradox Theory of Career Identity Maintenance and Change

People routinely conceive of themselves in their career in both stable and dynamic ways. Individuals may draw common threads across their various career experiences and aspirations to form a stable anchor for their career identity, yet, at the same time, dynamically adapt their self-concept in the context of their career. In this paper, we call attention to the anchoring and evolving forces that people experience as a paradox for their career identity and theorize “career identifying” as an ongoing process of career identity maintenance and change. As individuals contend with career identity tensions, they make adjustments to maintain a balance of anchoring and evolving forces on their career identity or to make shifts that accumulate into career identity change. The career identifying process accounts for both career identity maintenance and change in a single theoretical model that explains how career identity can change over time while being stable enough to make coherent career choices

One of Us or One of My Friends: How Social Identity and Tie Strength Shape the Creative Generativity of Boundary-Spanning Ties

Abstract Social ties to colleagues on other work teams can spur creative ideas and workplace innovation by exposing an individual to diverse knowledge. However, for external knowledge to be recombined into innovation, the knowledge must first be recognized as potentially valuable. Going beyond traditional structural explanations, we predict that the use of diverse knowledge to generate creative ideas and solutions will depend in part on employees’ psychological attachment to the organizational groups to which they belong, i.e., their social identity, and the strength of their social ties. We test our hypotheses in an R&D division of a global hightechnology firm, finding that social identity influences the creative generativity of boundary-spanning ties. Specifically, stronger team identity renders interactions with colleagues on other work teams less generative of creative ideas, while identification with an overarching, superordinate group (e.g., a division) enhances creative generativity. We also hypothesize and find that tie strength attenuates the negative effect of team identit