Managerial human capital is a valuable organizational resource comprising individual-level capacities that draw upon and leverage the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) gained by employees both before and after promotion to managerial positions. While all organizations need strategically valuable managerial human capital, asymmetrical information in external labor markets creates uncertainty when firms look to hire individuals who can develop and/or provide these capacities. In contrast, internal labor markets, with the unique insights they have on current employees, are better equipped to assess workers’ managerial potential and competencies. As a result, an individual’s career outcomes in their current organization signal important information about their managerial human capital to hiring firms. In this paper we explore how signals sent by an individual’s time to first managerial promotion and time in managerial roles relate to their external mobility. We argue that there are nuanced and sometimes countervailing demand- and supply-side theoretical mechanisms that result in inverted U-shaped associations between these signals of managerial human capital and external mobility. We test our theory using complete career histories from a unique longitudinal and population-level dataset of 2,079 professionals employed in the scouting operations of Major League Baseball franchisees from 1988 to 2010. In addition to contributing to our understanding of signals and external mobility, the results of our logistic discrete-time event history analysis inform broader discussions concerning firm-specific human capital resources and provide new insights on the unique challenges associated with managerial human capital selection.

中文翻译：

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管理人力资本和外部流动性：信号视角


管理人力资本是一种宝贵的组织资源，包括个人层面的能力，这些能力利用并利用员工在晋升到管理职位之前和之后获得的知识、技能、能力和其他特征 （KSAO）。虽然所有组织都需要具有战略价值的管理人力资本，但当公司希望雇用能够发展和/或提供这些能力的个人时，外部劳动力市场的不对称信息会带来不确定性。相比之下，内部劳动力市场对现有员工有独特的见解，更有能力评估工人的管理潜力和能力。因此，个人在当前组织中的职业成果向招聘公司发出有关其管理人力资本的重要信息。在本文中，我们探讨了个人首次管理晋升的时间和担任管理角色的时间所发出的信号如何与其外部流动性相关。我们认为，存在微妙的、有时是相互抵消的需求侧和供给侧理论机制，导致这些管理人力资本信号与外部流动性之间存在倒 U 形关联。我们使用来自独特的纵向和人口级数据集的完整职业历史来检验我们的理论，该数据集来自 2,079 年至 1988 年在美国职业棒球大联盟加盟商的球探业务中雇用的 2010 名专业人士。除了有助于我们理解信号和外部流动性外，我们的逻辑离散时间事件历史分析的结果还为有关公司特定人力资本资源的更广泛讨论提供了信息，并就与管理人力资本选择相关的独特挑战提供了新的见解。