TY  - JOUR
AU  - Huckman,Robert S.
AU  - Pisano,Gary P.
TI  - The Effect of Organizational Context on Individual Performance
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 10027
PY  - 2003
Y2  - October 2003
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10027
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10027.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Robert Huckman
435 Morgan Hall
Harvard Business School
Boston, MA  02163
Tel: 617/495-6649
E-Mail: rhuckman@hbs.edu
AB  - Several observers have suggested that highly skilled workers convey little in the way of competitive advantage for firms due to their mobility. Implicit in this view is the belief that organizations are not important in determining the performance of such individuals. In this study, we address this issue by examining skilled individuals who work within multiple organizations roughly simultaneously. Specifically, we consider the performance of cardiac surgeons, many of whom perform operations at multiple hospitals during the course of a given year. Using patient mortality as an outcome measure, we find that the quality of a surgeon's performance at a given hospital improves significantly with increases in his or her annual procedure volume at that hospital but does not significantly improve with increases in his or her volume at other hospitals. Our findings suggest that surgeon performance is not fully portable across hospitals (i.e., some portion of performance is firm specific). We consider the implications of our results for settings beyond health care.
ER  -