All aboard! co-mobility, human capital, and labor market prospects after organizational failure

In the paper, we integrate the research on co-mobility and individual outcomes with the literature on organisational failure and negative social evaluation by studying employees’ career evolution following co-mobility triggered by a sudden organisational failure. We theorise and uncover evidence of decreased promotion odds for co-mobile employees in the wake of organisational failure, lending support to co-mobility as a useful tool to secure a job, albeit at a cost, especially for seniors. We further explore the effects of intra- and inter-industry moves for juniors and seniors and find that for juniors, strategies that resulted in finding jobs relied on both co-mobility and solo moves within and outside of the focal industry. Although their social and human capital is more generic, juniors frequently acted as team builders and co-mobility orchestrators, as supported by our qualitative evidence. Seniors managed to avoid negative social evaluations even when moving solo within the focal industry, a strategy they used frequently, even in comparison to co-mobility. We test and find evidence for our theorising with the use of proprietary hand-collected data on 185 junior and senior employees who secured jobs in various countries and industries after an exogenous organisational failure in the bunker trading industry.