We examine the impact of key personnel’s loss to competition on their former employers’ creative performance. Using archival data on the career histories of designers and the creative performance of their fashion houses between 2000 and 2010, we find that a house’s outward centrality in the network of personnel mobility—resulting from personnel departures—has an inverted U-shaped relationship with the house’s creative performance. This relationship is moderated by the house’s inward centrality in a network of personnel mobility stemming from hiring competitors’ employees, the tenure of its creative directors, the accomplishments of these directors, and the house’s status. Our results suggest that organizations can enhance their creativity by relying on ideas obtained through relationships with their former employees long after these employees left to work for the competition. However, this effect is contingent upon characteristics of the organization that may be associated with its capacity to absorb these ideas and its ability to signal legitimacy of the resulting output to the external audiences.

Informational faultlines, the alignment of team member task-related attributes to form subgroups, are important in explaining team performance. Although informational faultlines may promote specialization and division of labor, they may also increase communication and coordination costs. Integrating work on the categorization-elaboration model, social identity theory, and contingency theory, we posit that facets of a team’s external environment moderate the effects of informational faultlines on performance. Using a sample of 380 top management teams, we examine moderation effects of environmental dynamism, complexity, and munificence. We find that informational faultline strength positively affects firm performance under low environmental dynamism, high complexity, and high munificence, but it negatively affects firm performance under high environmental dynamism, low complexity, and low munificence. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory and practice.

Stressor and exchange relationship paradigms have developed in isolation from each other to explain the negative effects of perceived organizational politics. We outline how these different paradigms share a common basis—a focus on psychological need satisfaction—and develop a needs-based paradigm to account for the negative effects of perceived organizational politics. Moreover, we argue that psychological need satisfaction acts as an unmeasured third variable, which, once accounted for, should limit the utility of stressor and exchange relationship paradigms. Across four samples using a combination of multiple sources, operationalizations of constructs, and measurement occasions, we found full support for the needs-based paradigm as a mediator of the effects of politics on contextual performance, creativity, and proactive behavior, whereas strain and exchange relationship constructs by and large had no effect on outcomes once psychological need satisfaction was accounted for. Theoretical implications and future research directions are discussed.