Lisa Ellram

Research Summary Pipeline hiring, repeatedly hiring individuals from the same external source organization, is a common recruiting practice. Yet, whether this pipeline approach improves incoming human capital quality or performance has limited empirical evidence. We argue that, in cooperative source‐hiring organization contexts, pipelines reduce the information asymmetries present in labor markets in a way that both attracts individuals with higher pre‐entry human capital and predicts postentry performance that surpasses pre‐entry expectations. In the context of particularly intense recruiting competition—American college football—we test and find support for these hypotheses. We also probe key boundary conditions, specifically discontinuity, geographic proximity, and factor market competition that highlight the limits of when the informational advantage is more or less salient. Managerial Summary Organizations often recruit through pipelines ‐ repeatedly hiring new workers from the same sources, such as universities or supply partners. Despite how common pipeline hiring is, we have little evidence to suggest if this practice helps hire more capable workers. Using rich data from American college football, we find that players who are successfully recruited through a pipeline tend to be rated as higher potential before joining their college team and perform better, holding their potential constant, in their collegiate career than players who joined from a standalone source. We argue that these benefits come from information flows between recruiting organizations, alumni, and prospective workers. When conditions make these information flows less exclusive, more interrupted, or redundant, we find evidence that the typical pipeline recruiting benefits diminish.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions in freight transportation is important for organizations. Transportation emissions are rapidly increasing in developing countries and are the second greatest source of emissions after electricity generation globally. Reducing freight transportation emissions is not a priority on the corporate sustainability agenda for many companies despite their significant impact on climate change. This research explores the paradox between the significant negative impact of freight transportation on climate change and its lack of saliency in corporate strategy using data from in-depth interviews with 12 organizations that are shipper members of SmartWay, a voluntary environmental partnership (VEP). Using mid-range theory (MRT) building beginning with legitimacy theory, this research explores how transportation functions and corporations measure and report freight transportation emissions reduction as part of the environmental sustainability agenda. The results provide insight into how an operationally focused VEP is challenged in gaining strategic organizational importance for its mission of freight emissions reduction and why the current approach of focusing on freight emission issues in transportation has limited traction.