Title
Sink or Swim: The Role of Workplace Context in Shaping Career Advancement and Human-Capital Development
Abstract
AbstractWe develop and test predictions on how early career challenges arising from the workplace context affect short-and long-term career advancement of individuals. Typically an organization's decision to deploy a manager to one of several possible contexts is endogenous to unobservable factors, and selection makes it challenging to disentangle the effect of workplace context on individual career advancement. We work around this problem by studying an organization, the Indian Administrative Services, which deploys entry-level managers quasirandomly across India. We find that managers deployed to more challenging contexts early in their careers experience faster career advancement in the short term. We present suggestive evidence that this is because challenging contexts provide managers more opportunities to develop skills "crucible experiences", and a greater motivation to relocate out of the challenging context. We also find that managers deployed to a challenging context early in their careers continue to experience faster advancement in the long term, suggesting that initial deployment to a challenging context is associated with human capital development. Managers initially deployed to more challenging contexts were not, however, more likely to break into the upper echelons of the organization.The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1115.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1287/orsc.2017.1115
Periodicals
Keywords
Field
DocType
location,workplace context,career advancement,performance,individuals,promotion,crucible experiences,motivation,internal mobility,human capital development,microfoundations,behavior
Microfoundations,Workplace context,Public relations,Knowledge management,Human capital,Administrative services organization,Unobservable,Business
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
28
2
1526-5455
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
7
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Shinjinee Chattopadhyay100.34
Prithwiraj Choudhury210.71