Context Factors and the Performance of Mobile Individuals in Research Teams

• Date: 01 January 2018
• Published date: 01 January 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12279

Context Factors and the Performance of Mobile

Individuals in Research Teams

Chiara Franzoni, Giuseppe Scellato and Paula Stephan

Politecnico di Milano; Politecnico di Torino and Collegio Carlo Alberto; Georgia State University

ABSTRACT We use survey data for 4336 scientific teams, located in 16 countries, where all

members were working within a single lab, to test three context factors that potentially affect

the capability of internationally mobile individuals to enhance the innovation performance of

their research units. We formulate hypotheses on context factors rooted in the knowledge

recombination and learning-by hiring theories. The results show that three context factors are

positively associated with international mobility and the performance of the research units: the

degree to which knowledge in the relevant subfield of science is geographically concentrated,

the creative intent of the activities performed and the decision power of the mobile individual.

Keywords: creativity, ethnicity, mobility, research teams, team performance

INTRODUCTION

Mobility of highly-qualified workers has been identified as a critical mechanism by which

organizations acquire distant knowledge, learn new routines and spur creativity, change,

and ultimately innovation (Dokko and Rosenkopf, 2010; Mawdsley and Somaya , 2016;

Palomeras and Melero, 2010; Rosenkopf and Almeida, 2003; Singh and Agr awal, 2011;

Slavova et al., 2016; Song et al., 2003). International movers a re one special component of

highly-qualified mobile workers, and one that has received comparatively little attention

from management scholars, despite their growing importance in intellectually-challenging

professions. According to the OECD-UNDESA (2013) report, during the first decade of

the 2000s, the global mobility of the high-skilled (e.g., individuals with tertiary-education)

increased by about 70 per cent, sufficient to make the rate of the tertiary-educated who

migrate from their origin country surpass the total emigration rate in virtually all coun-

tries.

[1]

Internationally-mobile workers in the USA were found to disproportionately

Address for reprints: Giuseppe Scellato, Department of Management and Production Engineering, Politec-

nico di Torino and Collegio Carlo Alberto, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, Torino, 10129, Italy

(giuseppe.scellato@polito.it); Chiara Franzoni, School of Management, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza

Leonardo da Vinci 32, Milan, 20133, Italy (chiara.franzoni@polimi.it)

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Journal of Management Studies 55:1 January 2018

doi: 10.1111/joms.12279

account for patented inventions, including higher-quality patents (No and Wa lsh, 2010)

and be more likely to become entrepreneurs (Hsu et al., 2007; Hunt, 2011).

The hiring of internationally-mobile professionals creates both opportunities and

challenges in the management of human capital within teams and companies. The liter-

ature on learning-by-hiring has stressed the relevance of the human and relational capital

mobilized by new hires (Mawdsley and Somaya, 2016). In the context of research and

innovation, international hires are seen as especially important for transferring knowl-

edge and skills that are highly specialized, fragmented or tacit (Herstad et al., 2015) and

cannot quickly be assimilated through other channels. To quote the physicist J. Robert

Oppenheimer, ‘The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person’.

[2]

In

theory, mobile individuals can make a positive contribution, by drawing on the knowl-

edge acquired at their prior location (Dokko et al., 2009; Jaffe et al., 1993; Kogut and

Zander, 1992), transferring ideas, and leading to greater absorptive capacity and learn-

ing within the receiving firms (Agrawal et al., 2006; Almeida and Kogut, 1999; Singh

and Agrawal, 2011; Song et al., 2003). They are also facilitators of relationships because

they can intermediate connections with collaborators and specialists known in prior

locations, providing more indirect access to distant knowledge, in addition to the knowl-

edge they supply (Breschi and Lissoni, 2009; Miguelez and Moreno, 2013; Scellato

et al., 2015; Singh, 2005).

The direct and indirect knowledge brought by international movers is deployed to its

best creative potential when used in combination with other sources of knowledge

(Katila and Ahuja, 2002). The remixing of knowledge from local and distant sources

creates opportunities to hybridize ideas, adopt cognitive maps, logics, specialized rou-

tines, methodologies, and solutions used in prior settings but new in the organization of

destination (Dokko et al., 2009; Fleming, 2001; Hargadon and Sutton, 1997; Katila and

Ahuja, 2002). These in turn help in overcoming the routines and traps of perpetuating

familiar endeavours (Ahuja and Lampert, 2001; Rosenkopf and Almeida, 2003; Rose-

nkopf and Nerkar, 2001).

Empirical and conceptual understanding of the implications and caveats of interna-

tional mobility are lacking in at least three respects. First, although knowledge flows

have been documented in prior work, relatively few studies have tried to document the

extent to which these translate to potentially higher performance, such as more or

higher quality innovations. Second, although a bourgeoning literature has looked at

inter-organizational mobility, few works have looked at international mobility. This is

disappointing, given the growing importance of internationally-mobile human capital.

Third, although sparse, prior work that has investigated the innovative performance of

internationally-mobile individuals suggests that it is sometimes, but not always, associ-

ated with superior performance in creative tasks (for a review see Kerr, 2013 and Fran-

zoni et al., 2014). Nonetheless, these analyses have largely overlooked context factors

which likely affect conditions under which mobile individuals operate and thus perform.

The capability of internationally-mobile workers to really make a difference at the new

location may in fact be affected by a number of context factors that frame the conditions

for the actual usage of the human and relational capital of mobile individuals.

This paper contributes to these three areas open to investigation, studying conceptu-

ally and empirically the correlation between internationally mobile individuals in teams

28 C. Franzoni et al.

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and innovation. We focus on teams of scientists that work in the same lab or unit. This

choice of setting offers several advantages, the most salient of which are: large portability

of skills,

[3]

a set of tasks clearly oriented to innovation, and relatively standard ways to

measure output characteristics and performances. It is drawn on recent works which

focus on scientific research as a setting for studying international mobility (Franzoni

et al., 2014; Freeman and Huang, 2015; Ganguli, 2015; Slavova et al., 2016) as well as

work that conceptualizes science in a knowledge recombination framework (Fleming

and Sorenson, 2004; Wang et al., 2016). We use an original sample of 4336 surveyed

scientists located in 16 countries conducting research in the four disciplines of biology,

chemistry, earth and environmental sciences and materials science. The dataset provides

us with comprehensive information on the subject of our investigation, including coun-

try of origin, instances of international mobility, and various kinds of context factors

observed for each individual in the sample.

Drawing from the literature on inter-organizational mobility, we disentangle three

families of context factors that likely contribute to explaining the correlation between

international mobility and performance: i) the relative attributes of knowledge at the ori-

gin and destination, ii) the environmental conditions under which the work is carried

out and iii) the attributes of the individual (Mawdsley and Somaya, 2016). Mirroring

this conceptualization, in this paper we focus on three context factors which we choose

because of their particular salience in the setting of internationally mobile scientists.

First, the degree to which specialty knowledge is concentrated in a few geographic areas

is one salient attribute that characterizes the respective position of the origin and desti-

nation settings and one that is characteristic of scientific competition (Stephan et al.,

2016). Knowledge concentrates under the pressure of some agglomeration forces, like

tacitness, inability to codify or the need of complementary skills that prevents diffusion,

making the mobility of scientists a critical engine of transfer (Maliranta et al., 2009).

Consequently, internationally mobile scientists should be more of a plus when agglomer-

ation forces are strong. Second, the goals and tasks that mobile workers are called upon

to perform are salient environmental conditions that affect the degree to which the

mobilized resources may or may not be used (Song et al., 2003). When the organization

strives to accomplish activities that are novel and unfamiliar, external input and knowl-

edge recombination are more likely to be necessary and sought, compared to when a

team engages simply in familiar activities. Third, the level of decision power that the

mobile scientist enjoys at the destination is a salient attribute in the setting of science

teams, which directly affects the level of knowledge that is drawn upon and its recombi-

nation with the knowledge of other members of the unit.

Here we distinguish scientific teams whose corresponding author is an internationally

mobile scientist (hereafter: mobile-scientist team) from teams whose corresponding author is a

non-mobile scientist (hereafter: non-mobile-scientist team) and compare the scientific achieve-

ments of the teams in light of the three context factors. We find all three factors to be

associated with a positive performance differential for mobile-scientist teams.

The results persist using alternative measures of relevant variables as well as the inclu-

sion of numerous individual and institution-level controls. Despite the robustness checks,

the possibility of reverse-causality remains and we are cautious in suggesting that it is

context that makes the mobile individuals more or less productive rather than mobile

29Mobile Individuals in Research Teams

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