The Effectiveness of Managerial Techniques in the Recovery from the Unexpected Loss of Employees

Using a natural experiment setting with a dataset on change of interdependence that an organization requires, and unexpected employee exit in a professional sports league for the period 1992 to 2010, this study examines the consequence of losing strategically important human resources (HR) and shows that how specific organizational recovering techniques for dealing with HR can help the firm’s strategic renewal process. The data present that the consequential impact of losing employees is depending upon the type of interdependence that organization relies on, which are pooled interdependence and reciprocal interdependence. Furthermore, the results indicate that: (1) during the individual-focused period (pooled interdependence), loss of star employees harms organizational performance, but this harm can be mitigated by strong resource-picking skill, and (2) during the collaboration-focused period (reciprocal interdependence), loss of non-star employees harms organizational performance, but this harm can be mitigated by strong capability-building skill.