Titel (eng)

The role of target difficulty and career tournaments in retaining creative R&D employees

Autor*in

Isabella Grabner   WU Vienna

Mischa Seiter   University of Ulm

Markus Wabnegg   University for Continuing Education Krems

Henning Wirth   Zeppelin University

Verlag

Wiley

Beschreibung (eng)

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).

Sprache des Objekts

Englisch

Datum

2024-01-15

Rechte

Dieses Werk bzw. dieser Inhalt steht unter einer
CC BY 4.0 - Creative Commons Namensnennung 4.0 International Lizenz.

CC BY 4.0 International

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Klassifikation

career tournaments

creativity

learning goal orientation