December Lightning Talk:

Beyond boundaryless: A friction-based model of career transitions

by Gina Dokko & Winnie Jiang

Abstract: Career transitions can be conceptualized as boundary-crossing events, and the costs of transitions as frictions that individuals encounter as they cross organizational, institutional, and psychological boundaries. Friction is usually understood to impose costs, but friction creates heat as well as drag. Likewise, career transitions have been shown to offer both opportunities and costs. We develop the concept of career frictions, which we define as disrupting differences between an individual’s attributes acquired in their career to date and the task and contextual conditions of a new job, to offer a general theoretical framework for explaining the portability of performance and under what conditions individual objective career success will fall, or rise, after a person changes jobs. The model also recognizes two important moderators. First, we theorize cognitive fixedness as an individual difference that could exacerbate how people experience frictions. People who tend to see things in a specific way, to the exclusion of alternatives, will tend to experience more career frictions. Second, we consider organizational socialization practices as a moderating influence in how friction will translate into career success outcomes. We propose that practices that encourage supplanting existing attributes with new ones will help minimize transition costs, while practices that incorporate attributes from prior careers will encourage the translation of career frictions into innovation and other forms of personal growth that go beyond just learning the job.