Sink or Swim: The Role of Workplace Context in Shaping Career Advancement and Human-Capital Development

Abstract

We 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 entrylevel managers quasi-randomly 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 Key words: context; location; workplace context, career advancement, performance; individuals; promotion; crucible experiences; motivation; internal mobility; human capital development; microfoundations.1 The authors thank Janet Bercovitz, Ethan Bernstein, Gina Dokko, David Kryscynski, Joseph Mahoney, Mario Schjiven, Deepak Somaya, Olav Sorenson, Michael Toffel, seminar audiences at Sumantra Ghoshal Conference, London Business School, The Wharton Business School and University of Washington at St. Louis, the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their comments, suggestions and advice on this paper, and Katie Moore for editorial help. 2Career advancement measured in terms of promotions, and human-capital development during employment, are important topics for both individuals and organizations (Coff 1997, Wang andBarney 2006). The path to career advancement affects future rewards for both individuals and organizations (Bidwell and Mollick 2015), and prior literature has shown that career experiences can shape and reveal human capital and affect career advancement of individuals (Campbell 2013, Dokko et al. 2009). The literature has also documented that early career experiences have a lasting effect on subsequent job performance via socialization, approaches to problem solving (Tilcsik 2014), and access to reputationbuilding opportunities (Briscoe and Kellogg 2011).Past work has studied how contextual features like resource munificence affect individuals, but much of this work has focused on the impact of economic and technological factors on individual performance (Tilcisk 2014). A relatively unexplored area is studying the impact of workplace challengeuncertainty and threats arising from the broader sociopolitical cont...

Socially advantaged? How social affiliations influence access to valuable service professional transactions

“…In our case, social capital provides access to valuable transactions, which then facilitates reputation building. Third, our results add to the growing body of work investigating how early‐career events and decisions impact worker careers (Briscoe & Kellogg, ; Chattopadhyay & Choudhury, ; Sørensen, ). Finally, our results contribute to the literature on social capital and entrepreneurship, showing the nonintuitive result that in some cases social capital is associated with less entrepreneurship.…”

“…The third contribution stems from examining reputation‐building and the interplay of individual and firm reputation. Research has shown how events and decisions early in an individual's career have long‐term implications for career outcomes (e.g., Briscoe & Kellogg, ; Chattopadhyay & Choudhury, ; Sørensen, ). Our study provides another piece of evidence in this regard, showing how reputation is built through early‐career transactions.…”

Retaining the social goal: role of path creation in for-profit social enterprises

“…Perkmann and Spicer (2014) found that banks originating in a regulatory regime that promotes expansion through opening branches developed better organizational capabilities for expansion, even in states where there was no regulatory encouragement of branch expansion. Along similar lines, Chattopadhyay and Choudhury (2017) found that managers of Indian Administrative Services deployed in challenging contexts experienced faster career advancement. Many of these managers developed crucial skills by exploiting opportunities offered by the challenging context.…”

The influence of personality on individuals' expatriation willingness in the context of safe and dangerous environments

“…Our findings are supported by previous research. For instance, Chattopadhyay and Choudhury (2017) found that individuals who moved to dangerous areas advanced in their careers more than those who did not. The authors mention opportunities for skill development as a crucial reason for this finding.…”