Left behind? Understanding the career consequences of collaborator exits

Prior research on career interdependence has focused on how colleague exits shape employees’ intra-organizational careers through the creation of job vacancies and vacancy-driven promotion. In this paper, I propose that colleague exits can shape employees’ careers through the creation of valuable relational “vacancies.” Focusing on employees engaged in collaborative research, and drawing on the vacancy chains literature, I argue that colleague exits create new collaboration opportunities for remaining employees that can enhance learning and facilitate competency-driven promotion. Yet employees will benefit only when these opportunities arise as a result of their own collaborators leaving—that is, employees must lose to gain. Using longitudinal data on employees within in a single research organization, I show that collaborator exits increase the likelihood of employees’ competency-driven promotion in a way that non-collaborator exits do not. Furthermore, it is the exit of higher-level collaborators that is most beneficial. These findings highlight a different type of career interdependence and the role of collaborator mobility in shaping the intra-organizational careers of knowledge workers.