Corporate rot: Job-hopping managers look out for themselves, not company culture

Company culture is incredibly important to today’s workforce. No one wants to represent an organization that promotes toxicity and negativity, so it makes all the sense in the world that employers of all shapes and sizes are now prioritizing positivity and strong company values across the board.

Of course, corporate culture starts at the top. If a corporation’s top brass exude insincerity and callousness, chances are you’ll find similar sentiments throughout the entire organization. Upper management acts, and those decisions and impressions reverberate across all pay grades. Simply put, business leadership sets the tone for everyone else.

Virtually every manager or boss will tell you that they want to promote a positive company culture, but many can’t help but prioritize their own self-interests. Let’s take a look at the impact of job-hopping leadership on organizational culture.

Certain company values look better on a resume

Recent research published in the scientific journal Contemporary Accounting Research conducted by scientists at the University of Melbourne analyzed the behavior of managers with a penchant for jumping from position to position with different companies. They discovered job-hopping corporate leaders tend to promote the cultural values that will help them land their next job while ignoring other considerations that would likely be perceived as more important by their employees.

The research team focused on five values deemed essential to organizational culture by prior studies: integrity, respect, teamwork, quality, and innovation. This approach revealed job-hopping managers are more likely to prioritize innovation over the other four values. According to study authors, this is likely because innovation is more readily visible to future employers. 

Researchers posit innovation is especially public because anyone outside a given company can check how much is being spent on research and development (R&D) via financial statements and/or whether or not the company is consistently producing innovative outputs (patents, etc). 

Managers and bosses with a history of job-hopping usually mentioned innovation more, even if it didn’t resonate with their employees. Study authors theorize this is the case because many job-hopping leaders care more about their image on the wider job market and climbing the corporate ladder (even if that means switching employers) than anything else.

On the other hand, leaders who preferred to seek career advancement internally with their current employer did not show the same propensity for demanding innovation. 

Assessing the words & actions of job-hopping leaders

This was no small research project. Study co-authors Professor Margaret Abernethy AM, Associate Professor Chung-Yu Hung, and Associate Professor Like Jiang focused on senior-level managers at S&P 500 indexed firms (the biggest publicly traded U.S. companies). Each one of the firms boasted various senior managers (CEO, COO, etc). In all, researchers gathered 56,234 records pertaining to senior managers’ employment history spanning 2002 to 2017. From there, they conducted analyses on 10,932 observations.

To start, they analyzed how such managers speak and express themselves in earnings conference calls, researchers explain in a media release. For reference, earnings conference calls typically occur on a quarterly basis and serve as a time to discuss a firm’s financial performance and other non-financial matters. Next, study authors assessed each manager’s words before calculating precisely how many times they mentioned one of the five aforementioned values considered critical to building corporate culture (integrity, respect, teamwork, quality, innovation). 

The managers’ words were then compared to organizational reviews posted by both current and former employees on a popular social media platform. This was done to establish which values employees see as the most important. Those comparisons facilitated an examination of just how closely each leader’s values actually aligned with what their employees considered the most valuable to corporate culture. 

Finally, every manager’s employment history was accounted for in order to ascertain if job-hopping managers shared or deviated from their employees’ values. Since each included company had more than just one manager, study authors included the history of the top five managers in a company. Job-hopping, meanwhile, was determined via average tenure per job.

Company culture: Everyone should be on the same page

Akin to any sports team or stage production, results will likely suffer if everyone in a company doesn’t agree when it comes to collaborative culture. If a boss is obsessed with innovation while his or her employees care far more about quality or integrity, it won’t take long before serious cracks begin to show in companywide performance. 

While managers with numerous companies listed on their resume may potentially bring a diverse array of expertise to the table, this work certainly suggests there may be a downside to bringing in job-hoppers on the management side of business.