Seconded employees bring innovation and ideas

Employees who are on secondments often choose more innovative ideas and influence permanent staff to do the same, according to an academic study.

ESMT Berlin business school in looked at how seconded employees, who are individuals temporarily assigned to a different role in another organisation or department, shared ideas and collaborated with their new teams, and the impact on the team itself.

Linus Dahlander, professor of strategy and Lufthansa Group Chair in Innovation at ESMT Berlin worked with researchers from Aarhus University, Warwick Business School, and Bocconi University on the research, which was published in Strategic Management Journal.

The analysed information on seconded employees serving at the National Science Foundation between 2000 and 2012, and the grants that were awarded to the foundation over that period.

The NSF allocates research funds; programme directors send proposals for external review and then assemble and lead expert panels before making funding recommendations or decisions. The NSF also runs a secondment scheme in which permanent and seconded employees act as programme directors.

The team conducted 37 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with former seconded employees, permanent employees, as well as former panel members.

They looked at whether a grant awarded was similar to previous ones, and those that were more different were branded as novel.

Through the interviews and analysis, they found that seconded employees tended to choose…