We examine how signals of a candidate’s capability affect perceptions of that person’s commitment to an employer. In four experimental studies that use hiring managers as subjects, we test and show that managers perceive highly capable candidates to have lower commitment to the organization than less capable but adequate candidates and, as a result, penalize high-capability candidates in the hiring process. Our results show that managers have concerns about a high-capability candidate’s future commitment to the organization because they view highly capable candidates as having lower levels of organizational interest—meaning they care less about the mission and values of the organization and exert a lower level of effort toward those ends—and because they assume highly capable candidates have more outside job options, increasing their flight risk. Our findings highlight that capability signals do not necessarily afford candidates an advantage in selection, suggesting an upper limit on credentials and other signals of capability in helping candidates get jobs. Our study contributes to research on labor markets, human capital, and credentialing by offering a theory for why and when capability signals can negatively influence job candidate selection decisions.
Innovative technology may reduce organizations’ reliance on professionals in the performance of expert tasks, weakening professions’ control over work. However, professions resist and challenge such innovation, framing it as unsafe and immoral. This paper theorizes a process by which innovative nonprofessional firms overcome the resistance, enter professionalized markets, and weaken professional control over work. It analyzes the rise of a new organizational form—retail health clinics—that deprofessionalized some medical tasks in U.S. primary healthcare. An analysis of newspaper articles, archival documents, and interviews with key industry participants suggests that retail clinic chains capitalized on long-standing jurisdictional tensions between the physician and nursing professions. The clinics operated by relying on nurses’ legal rights to perform physicians’ tasks and defended retail medicine as a safe and morally justified innovation by using the nursing profession’s established repertoire or frames and arguments. Sentiment analysis of over 1,600 newspaper articles suggests that the legitimacy of retail clinic chains in public discourse improved with the proliferation of the clinics, but the legitimacy of nurse practitioners did not. Nonprofessional firms thus introduced an innovation that weakened professional control over medical work by capitalizing on interprofessional tensions and repurposing professions’ own jurisdictional claims.
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