door.donau-uni.ac.at o:4211 DOI 10.1111/1911-3846.12931 The role of target difficulty and career tournaments in retaining creative R&D employees We explore the turnover intentions of creative R&D employees and the role of performance management practices in shaping these considerations. Since the success of a firm's R&D efforts hinges on the innovative ideas of its employees, it is crucial to retain particularly creative individuals. At the same time, however, we argue that this is especially difficult because both the higher outside options of creative employees and their specific individual characteristics make them, on average, more likely to leave their company. Most importantly, we suggest that two widely studied performance management design choices (target difficulty and career tournaments) typically used to motivate effort may influence the loss of creative talent. Using survey data from our unique access to R&D employees of a large manufacturing firm and a complementary experiment among business students, we find evidence that creative employees are, on average, more likely to leave their firm. Consistent with creative employees possessing a stronger learning orientation, we also predict and find that this tendency to leave is mitigated by target difficulty (as difficult targets speak to creative individuals' learning orientation) and exacerbated by the intensity of career tournaments (as they reduce team cohesion and, ultimately, undermine learning opportunities). eng career tournaments creativity learning goal orientation 2024-03-27T07:49:20.808Z LOMv1.0 Author BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Grabner;Isabella; FN:Isabella Grabner X-ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4387-888X END:VCARD BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Seiter;Mischa; FN:Mischa Seiter X-ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8042-8629 END:VCARD BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Wabnegg;Markus; FN:Markus Wabnegg X-ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4572-6852 END:VCARD BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Wirth;Henning; FN:Henning Wirth X-ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1433-0786 END:VCARD https://w3id.org/kim/hcrt/scheme https://w3id.org/kim/hcrt/text Textdokument Text LOMv1.0 yes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 application/pdf 1349373 https://door.donau-uni.ac.at/o:4211 https://door.donau-uni.ac.at/api/object/o:4211/thumbnail LOMv1.0 discipline