Career Concerns versus Shared Values: An Empirical Investigation

We study the relationship between career concerns and shared values empirically using employee-employer matched data for the United Kingdom and overtime hours as a proxy for hard work. In line with standard career-concerns theory (Holmstrom 1982 ¨ ) we find that employees work less overtime, the longer they have been with their current employer. We also find that employees who agree strongly with the statement, “I share many of the values of my organisation” do roughly 20% more overtime than the rest. Our results suggest the existence of a trade-off between career concerns and shared values. We begin to consider some potential implications of this for employee recruitment as well as for the design of career paths across the private, public and voluntary sectors.