Do Managers’ Affiliation Ties Have a Negative Relationship with Subordinates’ Interfirm Mobility? Evidence from Large U.S. Law Firms
研究发现，当两家律师事务所的负责人曾就读同一法学院且同期毕业时，这两家律所之间律师的跨企业流动显著减少，尤其是对高级律师的招聘影响更大。
We hypothesize that employee mobility between organizations will be lower when the organizations’ managers share affiliation ties. We test this idea by examining interorganizational employee mobility between large corporate law practices. We find that a practice area is less likely to hire attorneys from a rival practice area when the leaders of the two practice areas attended the same law school at the same time, our proxy for the presence of an affiliation tie. The negative relationship is stronger for hiring higher-ranked attorneys, and it is driven by practice leaders from the same law school class. Exploiting appointments of new practice leaders, we find a sharp and immediate decline in interorganizational mobility following an appointment that creates an affiliation tie between the leadership of the practice areas. Although we cannot rule out the possibility that job seekers’ preferences drive the results, we conclude that rival managers’ ties deserve further scrutiny because they might limit the outside employment opportunities of their subordinates.