Executive migration and interorganizational competition

This paper examines how the patterns of managerial careers affect change processes among formal organizations. By conceptualizing interorganizational mobility as a form of interorganizational relation, I operationalize the idea that the career choices made by individuals result in structures that constrain organizations. An analysis of the television industry shows that stations perform worse in the market for viewers when they recruit managers from the same sources as their competitors, net of controls for the station's overall recruitment activity. Theoretically, the results suggest that managerial mobility is a mechanism by which firms move through the competitive landscape, both intentionally and unintentionally, and that careers therefore are a source of evolutionary change in organizational populations. The strategic implication is that firms must attend not only to their positioning in product markets, but also to their positioning in factor markets, particularly the market for managerial talent. (C) 1999 Academic Press.