Scheller College of Business, Georgia Institute of Technology.
Department of Management, California State University, Chico.
J Appl Psychol. 2017 Jun;102(6):890-909. doi: 10.1037/apl0000200. Epub 2017 Mar 9.
As employee careers have evolved from linear trajectories confined within 1 organization to more dynamic and boundaryless paths, organizations and individuals alike have increasingly considered reestablishing prior employment relationships. These "boomerang employees" follow career paths that feature 2 or more temporally separated tenures in particular organizations ("boomerang organizations"). Yet, research to date is mute on how or to what extent differences across boomerang employees' career experiences, and the learning and knowledge developed at and away from boomerang organizations, meaningfully impact their performance following their return. Addressing this omission, we extend a careers-based learning perspective to construct a theoretical framework of a parsimonious, yet generalizable, set of factors that influence boomerang employee return performance. Results based on a sample of boomerang employees and employers in the same industry (professional basketball) indicate that intra- and extraorganizational knowledge construction and disruptions, as well as transition events, are significantly predictive of boomerangs' return performance. Comparisons with 2 matched samples of nonboomerang employees likewise suggest distinctive patterns in the performance of boomerang employees. (PsycINFO Database Record
随着员工职业轨迹从局限于单一组织内的线性发展演变为更具动态性和无界性的路径，组织和个人都越来越多地考虑重新建立之前的雇佣关系。这些“回巢员工”遵循职业轨迹，在特定组织中经历了 2 次或更多次时间上分开的任期（“回巢组织”）。然而，迄今为止的研究对于回巢员工的职业经历差异，以及在回巢组织内外获得的学习和知识如何以及在何种程度上对他们返回后的表现产生有意义的影响，仍然没有定论。为了解决这一遗漏，我们扩展了基于职业的学习视角，构建了一个理论框架，该框架包含了一组简化但具有普遍性的因素，这些因素影响着回巢员工的返回绩效。基于同一行业（职业篮球）的回巢员工和雇主的样本的结果表明，组织内和组织间的知识构建和中断，以及过渡事件，对回巢者的返回绩效有显著的预测作用。与 2 个匹配的非回巢员工样本的比较也同样表明了回巢员工绩效的独特模式。
