A large and growing literature spanning multiple fields has identified employee mobility as a critical influence on several important organizational outcomes. However, extant research on the topic is highly fragmented and lacks a unifying theoretical framework, impeding the development of a cumulative conceptually integrated body of research. We seek to remedy this situation by undertaking a review of research on employee mobility and its organizational impacts and casting it within a novel integrative conceptual framework. As a critical foundation for this framework, we highlight how the various organizational impacts of employee mobility are ultimately engendered by different dimensions of human and/or relational capital that are conveyed by mobile individuals. Building on this foundation, we describe how multilevel contextual factors-characterized as attributes of the employee, source and destination firms, and environmental conditions-may moderate the transfer and utilization of human and rela- IntroductionOver the last two decades, a significant research literature has emerged about the interorganizational movement of personnel and its substantial individual-level, organizational, and societal impacts. Inquiry into this phenomenon has spanned diverse fields, including economics, human resource management (HRM), strategic management, and sociology. However, while each of these respective research streams has provided valuable insights into the antecedents and consequences of the interorganizational movements of talent, the result is a research literature on employee mobility that is highly fragmented and disorganized.Despite its lack of coherence, literature on employee mobility is of particular interest to strategy and management scholars because the interorganizational movement of personnel affects important organizational outcomes, such as innovation (e.g., Rao & Drazin, 2002;Song, Almeida, & Wu, 2003), learning (e.g., Singh & Agrawal, 2011), capability acquisition and divestiture (e.g., Agarwal, Echambadi, Franco, & Sarkar, 2004), market entry (Boeker, 1997), relationship management (e.g., Broschak, 2004;Carnahan & Somaya, 2013;Somaya, Williamson, & Lorinkova, 2008), and even firm failure (e.g., Phillips, 2002;Wezel, Cattani, & Pennings, 2006). Building on Arrow's observation that the "mobility of personnel among firms provides a way of spreading information" (1962: 615), both scholars and industry practitioners alike have recognized that successfully navigating the market for human resources (HR) can be an important driver of firm competitive advantage (Barney, 1991;Cappelli, 2000;Gardner, 2002;Michaels, Handfield-Jones, & Axelrod, 2001).Moreover, ongoing technological, societal, and economic changes are accelerating the tendency for employees to switch employers (Cappelli, 2000;Henderson & Bierman, 2009) and increasing the intensity with which firms compete over high caliber talent (Coff, 1997;Gardner, 2005). Additionally, employees have become increasingly strategic in managing their careers by buildi...

Research Summary: We advance research on corporate diversification by joining insights from the demand-side and relational views in strategy to offer a novel theory of client-led diversification. We propose that client-led diversification results from a combination of the customer-driven opportunities emphasized in the demandside view and the creation of added value through relational assets that is a central tenet of the relational view. Furthermore, we hypothesize that suppliers' clientspecific knowledge, clients' relational commitment to suppliers, and growth opportunities in clients' markets (relative to the suppliers' own markets) will magnify the client-led diversification effect. We test our hypotheses using a longitudinal dataset on patent law firms and their diversification into new domains of patent prosecution work for their corporate clients. Managerial Summary: Explanations of why firms diversify into new lines of business have largely concerned the redeployment of underutilized resources, with little regard to opportunities or influences stemming from firms' existing customers. In our article, we show how the changing scope of business needs from a knowledge-based supplier firm's set of existing clients is a central driver of supplier-firm diversification, and this is especially the case when the level of relational assets shared between a supplier and its clients is higher. In a competitive landscape where suppliers compete intensively for the business of clients, our results show how managers can increase the likelihood of capturing additional business from its existing exchange relationships rather than bearing the risks of seeking new exchange relationships.

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The current paper complements and extends traditional Penrosean theories of firm growth by examining how a (supplier) firm’s relational embeddedness with its portfolio of existing buyers affects its business growth. Our theorizing rests on the foundation that a firm’s business growth stems from its breadth (or volume) of opportunities for creating added value with buyers, which more fully realizes the Penrosean vision that firm growth can be explained by a dynamic interaction between productive resources and demand-side market opportunities. Although relational embeddedness may give a supplier dyadic advantages with focal buyers, which supports business growth, we theorize that it can also lead to narrower added value business opportunities with the supplier’s entire portfolio of buyers. Critically, we hypothesize that the effect of relational embeddedness on business growth is moderated by a set of relational and demand-side attributes. These hypotheses are tested on a panel data set of patent law firms (suppliers) and their relationships with corporate clients (buyers). We find that greater relational embeddedness is associated with slower supplier business growth, and consistent with our hypotheses, this negative effect is alleviated when these firms have greater cross-servicing ability and receive more relational commitment from buyers but exacerbated when suppliers hold more buyer-specific knowledge and when buyers undertake more (internal) concurrent sourcing. In turn, our research demonstrates how the attributes of a supplier’s relationships with its portfolio of buyers can impact access to new business opportunities and thus opens up new directions for research on firm growth, demand-side strategy and buyer-supplier relationships.