Recent evidence suggests that frequent and broad lateral transfers increase the possibility of promotion. A question is how firms save the costs of these frequent lateral transfers given the existence of job-specific skills. This paper proposes a new theory of the transition across jobs based on the assumption that each job consists of tasks and that each of these tasks requires specific skills. This shows that firms synchronize the promotions and lateral transfers of their employees to reduce the cost of transferring to the employee those task-specific skills required for a new position. We find that this unique prediction is broadly supported by a large personnel data set in Japan.

最近的证据表明，频繁而广泛的横向转移增加了晋升的可能性。一个问题是，鉴于特定工作技能的存在，企业如何节省这些频繁的横向转移的成本。本文提出了一种新的跨工作过渡的理论，它基于以下假设：每个工作都由任务组成，并且每个任务都需要特定技能。这表明企业可以同步员工的晋升和横向转移，以减少向员工转移新职位所需的特定于任务的技能的成本。我们发现，这种独特的预测得到了日本大量人员数据集的广泛支持。