Education Commons^™

Individual Performance And Taking On Firm-Specific Roles: The Case Of Business School Associate Deans, Jeff Dyer, David Kryscynski, Christopher Law, Shad Morris

Faculty Publications

The firm-specific human capital dilemma suggests that firms generally want employees to make firm-specific investments but that employees prefer not to make them. We suggest that individual performance may moderate this dilemma such that the dilemma increases as individual performance increases – i.e. firms may prefer high performers in firm-specific roles while high performers may resist these roles more than their lower performing counterparts. We examine our extended firm-specific human capital theory in a context where the classic firm-specific human capital dilemma likely exists: business academia. Using a unique dataset of 4,164 business school professors from 39 of the top …