Moving to a rival firm leads to a conflict of identities and causes movers to focus their competitive impulses on their former employer.
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Individuals who take up a position with a company that is in competition with their former employer tend to be highly motivated - unless their new function places them in direct opposition with former colleagues.
Those are results of a study by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich management scholar Thorsten Grohsjean.
The study was carried out by Thorsten Grohsjean (Assistant Professor of Strategy and Organization in High-Tech Industries at the Faculty of Business Administration at LMU) and his PhD student Pascal Kober, together with Dr. Leon Zucchini.
The authors analyzed the performance levels of star players in the North American Ice Hockey League in games that pitted against former team-mates. The researchers chose this approach because professional ice hockey provides a wealth of data relating to transfers and to the course and outcome of all National League games.
These include statistics on how often a player was involved in offensive plays in games against former team-mates, and how often they checked individual players who had previously played with them in the same team.
An employee's level of identification with the firm for which she works grows with time, and this sense of attachment cannot be simply left behind when she moves elsewhere.
The term "identification" here refers to the degree to which an individual's sense of self is bound up with his membership of the firm as a social and relational group.
As the new study shows, individuals who have just moved to a rival company strive to strengthen and emphasize their identification with their new employer by competing harder against the organization to which they previously belonged.
This strategy provides a means of coping with the conflict of loyalties that inevitably arises in such situations, as movers cannot immediately discard their previous collective identity.
Intense battles for talented people are not a phenomenon that is restricted to Silicon Valley. German firms too - especially those in highly competitive sectors of the economy - often recruit personnel from their commercial rivals.
"They do so in the hope that such recruits will bring them new expertise and valuable contacts," says Grohsjean.
In the case of consulting services and law firms, for instance, clients are often loyal to individual advisors, and when the latter move elsewhere they bring their customers with them.
Individuals who move to a competing company cannot easily divest themselves of their previous identity is further indicated by the fact that - as the new study shows - they are less inclined to compete directly with former colleagues. ■