Power to the outsiders: External hiring and decision authority allocation within organizations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Research Summary This study examines the relationship between external hiring and the allocation of decision authority within organizations, and how they interact to affect organizational change and innovation. We test our hypotheses using panel data for a nationally representative sample of businesses in Canada. We find that the practice of external hiring of managers and high‐skilled nonmanagerial employees predicts greater decision authority allocated to each respective level of the hierarchy. Reallocation of authority is positively moderated by the strategic priority of (a) workplace reorganization for managerial hiring, and (b) new product development for nonmanagerial hiring. We also find evidence of related associations with workplace reorganization and product innovation. The findings suggest that decision authority allocation is essential to effectively utilize externally acquired human capital. Managerial Summary This study examines how the effectiveness of hiring managers and high‐skilled nonmanagerial employees from outside the firm is related to how much decision authority they are granted. We show that for both types of employees, external hiring predicts greater decision authority allocated to each respective level of the organization. For managers, external hiring predicts a greater likelihood of organizational change when more decision authority is granted. Similarly, for high‐skilled nonmanagerial employees, external hiring predicts the development of more novel innovations when more decision authority is given. Overall, the results suggest that hiring talent from outside the firm by itself is not sufficient to expect benefits to the organization—instead, firms must also empower outside hires with the authority needed to translate their knowledge into performance.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".