Good Enough to Move? Window-Dressing Performance Impending Turnover in Inter-Organizational Mobility

This paper suggests that employees impending turnover may have incentives to window-dress their performance. Window-dressing of performance refers to the inflation of performance in more visible dimensions (i.e., high level of quantitative performance) and the deflation in other performance dimensions that reflect quality (i.e., low level of qualitative performance) by which actors aim to give a good appearance to potential destination firm. By doing so, employees manipulate performance signals for their self-interest to boost visibility in the labor market and garner more bargaining power throughout the turnover process. In this paper, we focus on the Korean security analysts market and empirically test our hypotheses with a sample on 496 inter-organizational moves made by 345 analysts during 2000 and 2013. We find evidence that analysts do in fact window-dress performance in times impending turnover, in the form of inflating forecast volume (quantitative performance) while deflating forecast accuracy (qualitative performance).