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"Boomerang" employees are workers who leave an organization and are later rehired by that same organization. Although many organizations rehire former employees, only a handful of studies have examined this phenomenon. The present study uses a large, longitudinal data set to examine the performance and turnover of boomerang employees rehired into management positions (n = 1,318). Further, we provide some of the first comparisons between boomerang employees and two traditional sources of employees: external hires (n = 20,850) and internal promotions (n = 8,546). Evaluations of job performance before and after being rehired revealed that boomerang managers tended to remain the same--rather than increase or decrease--after being rehired. Furthermore, boomerang managers performed similar to internally and externally hired managers in the first year on the job, but both internal and external hires improved more than rehires over time. Internal and external hires were also less likely to turn over from the organization than rehires. The overall results call into question some of the assumed benefits of rehiring and suggest that organizations consider factors such as the reason for initial departure, the time horizon of performance, and the availability of other types of hires before considering boomerang employees. Future research opportunities to further delineate factors related to boomerang employees are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The micro-foundations of resource-based competitive advantage have been receiving increasing research attention as of late. This paper continues the work by Ployhart and colleagues (Ployhart & Moliterno, 2011; Ployhart, Nyberg, Reilly, and Maltarich, 2014) by attempting to distinguish psychological resources from human capital resources. In so doing, we propose psychological resources, while continually neglected, play a critical role in "transforming" what individuals within organizations "can do" into what they "will do." We define psychological resources as non-cognitive psychological elements that originate from within individuals but emerge collectively as shaped by the organization to become a source of competitive advantage. Drawing on research from multiple domains, we begin by developing and offering a typology of psychological resources. Next, we explain how, given their firm specificity and the nature by which they co-emerge with human capital resources, psychological resources are capable of contributing to firm sustainable competitive advantage. We also shed light on how such resources are managed, which enables us to identify a number of contingences associated with achieving unit-level outcomes using psychological resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research has not adequately explained how to target minorities during recruitment and the implications of this practice for nonminorities. Drawing on signaling theory and research on staffing, we develop a conceptual approach proposing that subgroup signaling markets exist within the labor market and use this concept to generate insight into the interdependence of trends in firms' recruitment strategies and patterns of behavior across subgroup signaling markets. We demonstrate that within-group trends in signaling have emerged over time wherein high-quality minorities have become more likely to "handicap" themselves by attending mainstream schools. We then propose that an increased emphasis on targeting diversity in recruitment has led to the manifestation of a "leading subgroup signaling market effect." Adapting to the influx of high-quality minorities as new, more proximally located and observable competition, nonminority individuals escalate their signaling behavior in more nuanced ways (e.g., through work experience and extracurricular activities). Finally, using a text-mining computer software program incorporating latent semantic analysis to extract meaningful information from Big Data collected by the organization regarding applicants, we introduce a new methodology that enables scholarship to examine signaling behavior in a more sophisticated manner. Results from three studies using 2,224-65,173 applicants largely support our hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior recruitment research offers little in the way of a unified framework explicating the various roles and exchanges involved throughout the recruitment process. Moreover, little is known regarding what types of individuals should be involved in recruitment, why, and what possible implications their involvement might have for the organization's recruitment outcomes. In this paper, we integrate prior recruitment research and exchange theory to develop a framework outlining the various roles, exchanges, and processes that recruiters are involved in throughout all three stages of recruitment. We also draw on research on star performers to offer propositions regarding the implications of their involvement within in each stage of the recruitment process. We propose that recruiters adopt three different types of roles during recruitment. They function as promoters, gatekeepers, and salespersons. Each type of role involves a different type of exchange with the organization (as well as applicants). Further, we propose that, while involving star performers may be useful in many cases, it also poses somewhat of a dilemma in that these individuals have pre-existing exchange relationships with the organization, the nature of which affect their likely behavior during each stage of recruitment should they be involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue for conceptualizing job rotation as a system comprising multiple objectives including career development, succession management, and staffing. Because system functioning is affected by organizational structure, we examine how levels of leadership within the organizational hierarchy affect which objectives are emphasized and thus alter the relationships between job rotation, its antecedents, and its outcomes. Using a sample of roughly 4000 leaders, 20 years of data regarding their movement, and ethnographic fieldwork, we found that more frequent rotation accelerated leader development and that the relationship between frequency of rotation and development increased in magnitude as leaders progressed to upper levels of the organizational hierarchy. Further, the frequency with which developing leaders were rotated decreased as they advanced to higher levels of leadership. At lower and mid-levels of leadership, more frequent rotation resulted in lower levels of job performance as well as promotion at lower levels of performance. Upon advancing to a level of leadership where individuals were responsible for an entire unit the role of job rotation changed. Leaders were rotated as a consequence of demonstrating higher levels of job performance. Rotation at this level in one year, in turn, resulted in enhanced unit-level performance over the course of the next year. Job rotation may be one way for organizations to positively influence the differentiation (i.e., leader development) and integration (i.e., leadership development) processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]