Understanding an Overlooked Segment of the Workforce Helps Managers Lead

Managers have formal and official supervisory authority within an organizational hierarchy. As a result, a perennial concern of managers is employee mobility, i.e., the turnover of workers, and the implication of worker mobility for the staffing of critical functions in the organization. Managers in organizations can also be leaders. According to Burns, in his seminal volume Leadership (1978, 18): " Leadership over human beings is exercised when persons with certain motives and purposes mobilize… resources so as to arouse, engage, and satisfy the motives of followers... in order to realize goals mutually held by leaders and followers. " Consistent with this definition of leadership, a core challenge confronting a manager who seeks to lead is to figure out the motives of followers and encourage their commitment to blossom. In our work, we have observed that managers often have a common mindset about turnover and commitment that limits their ability to lead and, in particular, limits their ability to elicit commitment. Many managers approach commitment in a skewed, simplistic way. As a result, they fail to unleash the commitment of their employees, especially the commitment of a young, growing, mobile, and significant segment of their workforce we call Knowledge Nomads. Indeed, knowing the importance of worker commitment, and knowing how to secure it, are two separate matters. This difference is one of the keys to leading organizations, above and beyond managing. What is the common mindset that limits many managers' ability to elicit commitment from employees and, as a result, limits their ability to lead? Management theories almost universally presume that increased worker mobility and organizational commitment are inversely related. Thus, mobility is seen as coming at the expense of commitment and, by extension, at the expense of the positive outcomes of commitment. Our analysis challenges this dominant view on two fronts. First, our review of the relevant literature shows that conceptual and methodological biases have exaggerated the degree to which organizational commitment and worker mobility are inversely related. Second, the empirical research we conducted reveals that some of today's highly mobile workers present the potential for fostering organizational commitment amid conditions of high worker mobility, not in spite or instead of it. Such workers, whom we call Knowledge Nomads, are much more mobile than their parents. To better understand their characteristics, it is useful to draw an analogy to the Tuaregs, a nomadic people on the edge of the Sahara …