Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Moore School of Business

Sub-Department

Business Administration

First Advisor

Robert Ployhart

Abstract

Despite their operational and strategic importance to their firms, recruiters remain virtually invisible within management scholarship today. In this dissertation, I draw on research from a variety of theoretical perspectives and use role theory as a foundation for developing a theory intended to generate insight into the major individual, social, and contextual factors that underpin their behavior and performance. I define full life cycle recruiters as quasi-agentic brokers of resources among parties internal and external to a firm who operate at the intersection of social systems, are involved in recruiting, assessment, and onboarding processes, and adopt multiple micro roles with the primary purpose of enabling human capital resource accumulation. Key tenets of this theory are that (1) recruiter performance depends on the ability to forge and manage internal and external stakeholder relationships in such a way that cooperative and competing obligations to all stakeholders and/or stakeholder groups to which they should be attending are fulfilled, (2) recruiters’ capacities to fulfill obligations to all stakeholders and/or stakeholder groups are shaped and constrained by the nature of their micro role hierarchies, and (3) whether contextual events modify relationships among antecedents and recruiters’ micro role hierarchies or recruiters’ micro role hierarchies and performance is determined by event strength and duration. Following a pilot study, where I interviewed 10 recruiters and four supervisors, I derive several key predictions from my theory to empirically test using a sample of recruiters and supervisors from organizations across a range of industries who describe actual activities in their organizations.

Rights

© 2017, Michael C. Campion

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