About

Matthew Bidwell is a Professor of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. His research examines new patterns in careers and employment, focusing on the causes and effects of short-term, market-oriented employment relationships. He is particularly interested in the different kinds of career paths that individuals pursue in the modern labor market. Bidwell's work explores topics such as international mobility and its impact on financial compensation, the role of search firms in managerial career mobility, the effects of supervisor mobility on subordinate career outcomes, and the dynamics of organizational mobility processes. His research has been published in various academic journals and featured in prominent media outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times. Bidwell has received several awards for his scholarly contributions, including the Scholarly Achievement Award from the Academy of Management Human Resources Division, the John T. Dunlop Outstanding Scholar Award from the Labor and Employment Association, and the Scholarly Contribution Award from Administrative Science Quarterly. He has also been recognized multiple times for teaching excellence at Wharton. Bidwell holds a Ph.D. from the MIT Sloan School, an S.M. in Political Science from MIT, and an M. Chem from Oxford. He serves as a faculty co-director of the Wharton People Analytics Initiative and as faculty director of the Wharton CHRO Program.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Business
• Process management
• Law
• Economics
• Political economy
• Positive economics
• Engineering
• Public relations
• Marketing

Selected publications

• Building Careers in Project-Based Organizations: Breadth, Fit, and the Path to Advancement

  Management Science · 2026-02-24

  articleSenior author

  Project-based organizations allow employees in ostensibly similar roles to acquire very different experiences by working on different kinds of projects. We study how people build careers in these contexts, examining when employees choose to diversify their experience—both in terms of project content and collaborators—and how the resulting diversification affects their career advancement. Using longitudinal project data from a services organization, our results suggest that employees initially explore different kinds of work by moving across project types, but then go on to find their fit in a particular area. This process is quicker for high-performing employees and for those with longer tenure and more diverse collaborator networks. We also find that promotion rates and compensation are lower for employees who worked on a broader portfolio of content types and collaborators in the most recent year, but higher for employees who had worked on broader project portfolios in prior years. This paper was accepted by Lamar Pierce, organizations. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.02622 .

  PublisherDOI

• Dynamic Demands versus Durable Skills: Career Dilemmas in Pharmaceutical R&D

  Academy of Management Journal · 2026-03-13

  articleSenior author

  Skill demands evolve over the course of individuals’ careers, as new roles demand different kinds of skills from previous jobs. Yet, skill portfolios can be slow to change. We posit that this tension between dynamic job demands and durable skills creates career dilemmas for building the right portfolio of skills for long-term success. Studying a group of scientists in the pharmaceuticals industry, we argue and find that while specialization helps scientists to advance faster initially, it holds scientists back once they reach managerial ranks where coordination skills are required. Within managerial ranks, scientists with broader experience will advance faster since their experience will develop broader knowledge and more diverse social capital, which in turn will help them build coordination skills. While we find some evidence that employees try to adapt to these changing needs over their careers, such efforts to adapt are insufficient. Instead, we find that the level of specialization acquired while working as a scientist continues to influence promotion rates after people are promoted into management. We thus show that a skill portfolio built to help advancement at one stage of the career may hold employees back at subsequent career stages.

  PublisherDOI

• Cultivating Talent: Integrating Structured Training and Experiential Learning

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article

  Firms' access to critical resources, particularly talent, are a key factor in achieving and sustaining a competitive advantage, and firms go to great lengths to design systems and processes to try to successfully source and aggregate human capital. To that end, firms generally pursue two types of strategies to access the needed talent – the pursuit of expertise to identify and hire existing talent or the development of talent pipelines internally. This panel aims to reflect on the latter strategy – the development of a talent pipeline. Specifically, we bring together scholars with research across two dominant tools used by firms for skill acquisition and development: (1) deliberate, structured training and (2) experience-driven position-based learning. By highlighting the intersections and distinctions between targeted training and learning-by-doing, the session will provide attendees with a deeper understanding of how these approaches can be leveraged to build talent effectively. Through this discussion, we hope to bridge gaps in current research, foster innovation in methodologies, and contribute to the evolving discourse on human capital’s critical role in strategy.

  PublisherDOI

• New Insights from Career Histories: Advancement, Diversity, and Social Performance

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article

  Novel large-scale, individual-level career history data have opened up new ways to study workforce composition, leadership trajectories, and organizational outcomes. This symposium presents four studies that use these data to examine how both external events and internal organizational conditions shape opportunity and diversity within firms. One study finds that while the Black Lives Matter movement leads to a short-term increase in the hiring of junior Black employees, this effect fades quickly, raising questions about lasting change. Another shows that women are less likely than men to present themselves as leaders on professional platforms, and that this gap is predicted by local social norms, suggesting that societal and organizational factors influence how individuals display their qualifications. A third paper identifies how organizational features cause underrepresented groups to use internal and external mobility differently than majority group members. A final paper explores the career histories of executives with government experience, finding that these executives may instill a mission mindset in firms, increasing their social performance. Together, these papers use newly available career data to offer evidence on where differences in opportunities persist, how leadership pipelines evolve, and how larger societal contexts play a role. This symposium underscores the potential of rich career history data to deepen our understanding of careers, organizations, and the broader social forces that shape them. BLM Movement and Workplace Racial Inequality Author: Simeng Wang; Columbia Business School Author: Letian Zhang; Harvard Business School Author: Yoongjae Shin; Harvard Business School Mission Mindset in the Upper Echelon Author: Forrest Briscoe; Cornell University Author: Thomas John Fewer; Rutgers University When do women present themselves as leaders? Author: Alan M. Benson; University of Minnesota Premium or Penalty? Differential Effects of Gender and Race on Promotions Author: Nathan Barrymore; McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin

  PublisherDOI

• Stepping Sideways to Step up: Lateral Mobility and Career Advancement Inside Organizations

  Management Science · 2024-04-02 · 10 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Although internal labor market theory emphasizes promotions as the main form of mobility within organizations, many internal job moves take people sideways into jobs that are at the same hierarchical level as the one that was left. Despite the prevalence of these lateral moves, however, we have little evidence on what role they play in workers’ careers. We argue that lateral mobility can facilitate subsequent career advancement by allowing for the development and demonstration of new skills and can, therefore, help those who would struggle to be promoted from their current job to develop their careers further. We establish empirical evidence on the implications of lateral mobility using eight years of personnel data from a large U.S. healthcare company. Our analyses show that those employees who move laterally are more likely to be subsequently promoted and achieve substantially higher pay growth than a matched sample of employees. We also find that lateral moves are more likely to be undertaken by those who have spent longer in the job but have lower performance than those who are promoted. This pattern of results suggests that lateral mobility provides an important avenue for career growth as people who step sideways in organizations are more likely to subsequently step up. This paper was accepted by Lamar Pierce, organizations. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.03746 .

  PublisherDOI

• Global Careers and Compensation: From Initial Penalties to a “Superglobal” Premium

  Academy of Management Discoveries · 2023-05-30 · 2 citations

  article

  This paper examines the relationship between international mobility and financial compensation for knowledge workers pursuing business careers. While some theoretical arguments suggest that international mobility may lead to higher pay, others suggest that it may lead to performance problems and lack of recognition, which could reduce financial rewards. Empirical research on the topic is limited, with cross-sectional data providing little insight into the relationship between international mobility and compensation over time. Our study overcomes this challenge by using a panel data set on the career histories of 1,322 MBA graduates. The results reveal a curvilinear relationship between international mobility and compensation over time. Making one or two international moves can have substantial negative effects on pay. However, further moves are associated with pay growth, and there is some evidence that those who move countries multiple times (“superglobals”) obtain substantially higher pay. We discuss the implications of our findings for research on international mobility and business careers.

  PublisherDOI

• Finding the right path to the top: How past interorganizational moves impact executive selection outcomes

  Strategic Management Journal · 2023-04-20 · 16 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Research summary Executives are a critical strategic resource but often build careers across multiple organizations. We explore how firms value that interorganizational mobility by studying executive selection. We suggest that hiring firms will value the diverse experience and adaptability that past mobility across organizations fosters, but that prior mobility can also signal a higher retention risk or lack of competency. Using data from an executive search firm, we employ search‐fixed effects model and structural equation models to estimate candidates' probabilities of receiving a job offer. We find that candidates' prior mobility indirectly increases their chances of being hired by increasing their functional diversity and reducing their tenure with their employer below 10 years. Net of these effects, prior mobility has a negative effect on hiring. Managerial summary Executives are increasingly building their careers across organizations. How do prospective employers evaluate their records of past moves when they are considered as external hires? We propose that by moving firms, individuals can accumulate diverse experience and become more adaptable, but employers may be concerned about retention or performance issues for those with records of frequent moves. Using executive search data, we find that prior mobility is valuable to the extent that it builds diverse functional experience; once it is accounted for, we find that prior mobility decreases the likelihood of receiving an offer. Further, staying at the same employer for 10 years or longer is unfavorable due to employers' concerns about adaptability and firm‐specific skills. Our survey of fifty‐four CHROs resonates with these findings.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Forging a Path: How Education Shapes Orderliness of External Career Mobility

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24

  article

  The employment relationship has fundamentally shifted over the last 40 years as firms have moved from an organizational- to market-based employment orientation, including a decline of internal labor markets (ILMs). Workers have borne the brunt of these shifts as work has become more precarious and wages less equitable. Specifically, while ILMs facilitate known and predictable career paths, workers today often combine moves within organizations in the internal labor market with moves between organizations in the external labor market. In contrast to the predictability – or orderliness – of internal labor markets, movement between organizations in external labor markets introduces a degree of uncertainty to workers. In this paper, we examine how different segments of the labor market navigate the external labor market by considering two segments of the labor market with historically divergent outcomes: low- and high-educated workers. We consider the way education shapes careers by considering workers’ mobility between firms and how orderly those transitions are – or in other words, whether workers’ mobility follows predictable and expected patterns. We also study how education shapes the rewards available to workers for more or less orderly moves. To answer these questions, we use the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which follows a representative sample of workers from high school through the first 20 years of their careers. We find that workers with higher education (that is, a bachelor’s degree or higher) have more related – or orderly – mobility events. We also find that orderliness has an overall positive effect on wages, but that more educated employees reap greater rewards for orderly job transitions.

  PublisherDOI

• Do managers capture the value they create? Drivers of managers' value capture in a large retail chain

  Strategic Management Journal · 2022-03-24 · 7 citations

  article

  Abstract Research Summary We investigate the relationship between value creation and value capture among frontline managers. Using longitudinal data from a restaurant chain, we find that those managers who persistently create more value for the firm capture just 0.5% of that extra value through their pay. We explore the reasons for this limited managerial value capture using an abductive approach. We find some evidence that value capture may be limited by lack of alternative employment opportunities. More extensive evidence suggests that the employer often struggled to identify individual contributions to value creation, limiting managerial rewards. We discuss the theoretical implications of such limited managerial value capture for the strategic human capital literature. Managerial Summary Frontline managers can differ in how much they contribute to firm profitability. Do those managers who contribute the most to firm performance also capture those benefits back through higher pay? In a study of restaurant managers, we find that managers differ substantially in the profits that they create, but that the most profitable managers only capture 0.5% of the extra profits they create. We also find evidence that the firm often fails to identify which managers are the most persistently profitable, potentially reducing the rewards paid to those managers. By demonstrating that differences in performance are not balanced by differences in pay, we show how high‐performing managers can be an important strategic resource for organizations.

  PublisherDOI

• Racial Inequality and Status in Contemporary Organizations: A Supply- and Demand-Side Perspective

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2022-07-06

  article

  Among contemporary organizations that purportedly support an equal and equitable workplace, we often see mixed evidence involving employees’ own experiences, particularly those of minority individuals, in response to issues involving racial inequality, such as racial discrimination and bias, that remain persistent in the workplace. These issues also point to the relevance of status of individuals and organizations on both the supply- and demand-sides of the labor market. While studies attempt to address the consequences of such issues, further work that focuses on current and more recent efforts to address issues of racial inequality, particularly from the vantage point of individuals of minority racial groups, needs to be explored. This symposium not only aims to provide further contribution to these areas with an empirical oversight of the interplay of organizational status, diversity, and racial stratification, but it also uniquely hones in on the salience of Asian Americans as a racial group that moves beyond the scope of a traditional focus on a Black/White dichotomy that has often been the subject of relevant literature. At the end of the presentation, Matthew Bidwell, a leading scholar on status and inequality in organizations, will facilitate an interactive group discussion about these papers with the audience and presenters with key commentary. Keywords: race, inequality, status, diversity, racial stratification, labor markets Threading the Diversity Needle: Minority Group Presence and Perceptions of Organizational Status Presenter: Noah Askin; INSEAD Seeking Only the Best: How Hometown Pressures Influence (East-) Asian Americans’ Status Aspirations Presenter: Oliver Hahl; Carnegie Mellon U. - Tepper School of Business Presenter: Jenny Oh; Carnegie Mellon U. - Tepper School of Business Presenter: Trevor Daniel Young-Hyman; U. of Pittsburgh Racial Inequality in Organizational Environments Presenter: Letian Zhang; Harvard Business School Creativity Ceiling: Stereotypes and Underrepresentation of Asian Americans in Corporate Leadership Presenter: Wyatt Lee; U. of Toronto

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Adina D. Sterling

  Columbia University

  10 shared

• Isabel Fernandez‐Mateo

  London Business School

  10 shared

• JR Keller

  Cornell University

  9 shared

• Roxana Barbulescu

  8 shared

• Forrest Briscoe

  Cornell University

  8 shared

• Isabel Fernandez‐Mateo

  London Business School

  7 shared

• Ethan Mollick

  7 shared

• Shinjae Won

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  5 shared

Awards & honors

• Scholarly Achievement Award from the Academy of Management H…
• John T. Dunlop Outstanding Scholar Award from the Labor and…
• Scholarly Contribution Award from Administrative Science Qua…
• Wharton Teaching Excellence Award