Left Behind? Understanding the Career Consequences of Collaborator Exits

Prior research on career interdependence has focused on how colleague exits shape employees' intraorganizational careers through the creation of job vacancies and vacancy-driven promotion. In this paper, I propose that colleague exits can shape employees' careers through the creation of valuable relational "vacancies." Focusing on employees engaged in collaborative research, and drawing on the vacancy chains literature, I argue that colleague exits create new collaboration opportunities for remaining employees that can enhance learning and facilitate competency-driven promotion. Yet, employees will benefit only when these opportunities arise as a result of their own collaborators leaving—that is, employees must lose to gain. Using longitudinal data on employees within a single research organization, I show that collaborator exits increase the likelihood of employees' competency-driven promotion in a way that noncollaborator exits do not. Furthermore, it is the exit of higher-level collaborators that is most beneficial. These findings highlight a different type of career interdependence and the role of collaborator mobility in shaping the intraorganizational careers of knowledge workers.