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Inhalt:
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The practice of external hiring continues unabated, despite abundant evidence that its costs often exceed its returns. In view of this, we consider whether external hiring provides value to firms that prior research has not captured: Namely, greater opportunity for intrapreneurship. Consistent with organizational learning theory, learning-by-hiring, and studies of innovation, we predict that external hires are at greater risk of intrapreneurship than internal hires. We test this prediction via a study of product managers in large technology companies. We use machine learning to operationalize intrapreneurship by comparing product manager job descriptions to the founding statements of venture-backed technology entrepreneurs. Our research design employs coarsened exact matching to balance pre-treatment covariates between product managers who arrived at their roles internally versus externally. The results of our analysis indicate that externally-hired product managers are substantially more intrapreneurial than observably equivalent internal hires. However, and consistent with prior research, we find that intrapreneurial product managers have a higher turnover rate, an effect that is amplified for intrapreneurial external hires. This suggests that hiring for intrapreneurship may be a difficult strategy to sustain |
