Mobility of Top Marketing and Sales Executives in Business-to-Business Markets: A Social Network Perspective

In business-to-business markets, top marketing and sales executives (TMSEs) have considerable influence on their organizations' customer strategies. When TMSEs switch firms, a pattern of informal organizational connections results; this pattern reflects the flow of information and knowledge among firms and createsmanagerial social capital in the process. To model this information flow, the current study considers information reach and richness, conceptualized according to the network position (i.e., centrality and brokerage) of the firm in the TMSE mobility network, which can be constructed by tracing executive movements through the work experience records of TMSEs in an industry. TMSE tenure (i.e., time with the firm) and firm market orientation constitute critical moderators, which capture motivation and ability at the individual and firm level, respectively. Data from the semiconductor industry and a model that corrects for unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity suggest that managerial social capital enhances firm performance; however, TMSE tenure and firm market orientation are essential for absorbing the benefits of managerial social capital.