The Elites‐Mutual‐Attraction Effect: How Relative Reputation Influences Employee Flows between Organizations

In this study, we draw on signalling theory to examine the organization‐level relationship between reputation and employee movement in and out of organizations. Focusing on organizations’ media reputations relative to their peers, we map all employee flows between organizational dyads in a population of English hospitals. We find support for our main argument that an organization's relative reputation predicts employee mobility above and beyond what can be explained by its absolute level of reputation. In particular, our findings suggest that the number of employees moving between two organizations is highest when both organizations have a high reputation. We refer to this as the elites’ mutual attraction effect (EMA‐effect). We also find that the motives of voluntary leavers and geographical distance between two organizations influence the strength of this EMA‐effect. Overall, this study shows that developing and testing dyadic theory can extend research on organizational reputation and collective turnover in meaningful ways.