Despite sizable but varying estimates of multiple jobholding (MJH) and decades of research across disciplines (e.g., management, economics, sociology, health and medicine), our understanding of MJH is rather limited. The purpose of this review is to provide a coherent synthesis of the literature on MJH, or working more than one job. Beginning with a discussion of the motivations and demographic predictors that forecast MJH, we note a distinct divide between the research that predicts MJH and the research that examines outcomes, with few studies exploring how motivations might relate to MJH experiences and outcomes. Another significant observation in this review is the inconsistency of findings across and within disciplines regarding whether MJH is depleting or enriching. Using this framework to organize our review, we attempt to reconcile the generally mixed results by presenting research on mechanisms and boundary conditions of MJH to explain how and when multiple jobholders (MJHers) are depleted or enriched. By integrating findings from the literature, we are able to articulate more clearly the paths of depletion and enrichment and discuss how push versus pull-based motivations to hold multiple jobs likely predict these pathways. Finally, we provide a strategic agenda highlighting areas where additional research is urgently needed to equip scholars with practical knowledge on how to help MJHers manage their multiple work roles and how to help organizations manage MJHers.

This paper adapts real options theory to explain how executives create and maintain real options portfolios within leadership pipelines. Hypotheses flowing from our theorizing predict that executives often make seemingly risky staffing decisions for leaders who occupy stepping-stone positions. Focusing on their option (future potential) rather than project (current productivity) value, executives laterally transfer leaders in stepping-stone positions frequently, despite it resulting in lower short-term job performance, but often promote these leaders at lower levels of performance and sooner. Once leaders are promoted to destination positions where they may stay indefinitely, executives tend to transfer high-performing leaders more often but not when they are still improving the effectiveness of their current unit. We present evidence suggesting that executives make these decisions to improve other units and maintain a flexible system, possibly recapturing previous investments in developing those leaders. We provide empirical support for our hypotheses using eight years of data in a large retail organization (n = 25,004) where executives overseeing thousands of units made internal mobility decisions. These findings refine real options theory, show that it explains these phenomena better than existing theories, and provide important and immediately usable practical implications for executives. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.1608 .