​​​​Timothy Gubler

15. "Motivational Spillovers from Meaningful Experiences in Repeated Tasks: Evidence from Critical 9-1-1 Calls." (with Haibo Liu and Alexandru Roman). Under Review at Administrative Science Quarterly. 

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Professional employees frequently engage in repeated tasks that vary in experienced meaningfulness. In this paper, we examine how a meaningful task experience spills over to affect performance when the task is next repeated. We hypothesize and find that exposure to an acute 9-1-1 emergency call improves the subsequent performance of Emergency Medical Service (EMS) crews through a motivational spillover effect. Leveraging data from 57 million 9-1-1 calls across the United States and exploiting the quasi-random assignment of calls to EMS crews, we show that response times improve by 2.4–2.8% following a life-threatening emergency relative to a routine call. This motivational spillover is transient, dissipating within four hours, and is strongest when prior exposure to acute calls has been infrequent, with effect sizes ranging from 1.0–12.1%. The effect also diminishes with crew fatigue. Robustness checks help rule out key alternative explanations, including adrenaline or heightened salience, while supplemental interview evidence supports meaningful task experiences as the mechanism arising from reduced discrepancies between job expectations and reality. Our findings highlight the role of expectation–reality gaps in sustaining motivation and performance in intrinsically motivated occupations and suggest that strategically allocating meaningful tasks throughout the workday may enhance employee performance.

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• Winner of Distinguished Paper Award in Strategic Leadership, TMT, and Corporate Governance, STR Division, Academy of Management Annual Meeting Copenhagen, Denmark (2025).

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• Winner of best conference paper award for the Strategic Human Capital Interest Group, Strategic Management Society Annual Meeting Istanbul, Turkey, (2024).

 

16. "Serving Two Masters? The Association Between Firm Wage Structures and Employee Moonlighting Behaviors." (with Lena Lizunova). Working Paper. Available by request.

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Strategic human capital research has emphasized the importance of retaining productive talent. Yet contemporary labor markets offer increasing opportunities to moonlight, which enables employees to partially reallocate human capital outside the firm without formally leaving. We explore this phenomenon and theorize that internal firm wage structures shape moonlighting behaviors by signaling returns to internal investment. Using population-level employer–employee matched data from France, we show that greater vertical wage dispersion—pay differences across hierarchical levels—is associated with lower subsequent moonlighting, particularly among higher-level employees for whom advancement appears attainable. In contrast, horizontal wage dispersion –pay differences across peers—reduces moonlighting among lower-level employees. These findings reconceptualize external engagements as an ongoing effort-allocation decision and identify internal pay structures as strategic levers for limiting human capital leakage.

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17. "Individual-level Origins of Firm-level Human Capital Resources" (with Ryan Cooper and David Kryscynski). Working paper. Available by request.

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Understanding the emergence of firm-level human capital resources from individual-level human capital is crucial to explaining how firms can create and sustain competitive advantage from their people. We theorize that higher similarity among the individual-level components of a firm’s founding human capital resource leads to higher subsequent average overlap between individuals and the established firm-level human capital resource, and that this higher overlap improves firm performance. Analysis of individual- and firm-level human capital portfolios constructed using data from 872 real estate brokerages suggests that higher individual-level human capital similarity among agents at founding positively relates to individual-firm human capital overlap in future years, and that higher individual-firm human capital overlap positively relates to future firm sales. These results imply that managers from founding onward must carefully craft and manage individual- and firm-level human capital resources to generate persistent performance advantages.

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18. "Credentials, Connections, or Competence? How Consumers Choose Service Professionals" (with Ryan Cooper and Jim Oldroyd). Working Paper. 

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Professional service firms offer credence goods, making quality assessment difficult. Using National Football League data, we examine how agents' credentials (human capital), connections (social capital), and reputation (competence) influence player selection. We test how the credentials, connections or competence of agents impact players' selection decision. Results show social capital is more important than human or reputational capital in initial and subsequent agent choices. This persists even as players gain experience. Finding suggests professional service providers should emphasize their networks and connections over credentials or track records when attracting clients, as social capital proves the dominant factor in client selection decisions. 

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19. "Specialized Human Capital in Professional Services: Task Specificity and Firm Performance." (with Ryan Cooper). Working Paper. 

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This paper examines the relationship between the autonomous specialization decisions of service professionals and the tacit human capital they develop. As individuals specialize in production in response to market and organizational factors, they develop task-specific human capital which induces them to continue to specialize. Task specificity of human capital benefits the firm due to its higher productivity, even after negative shocks to the market. Individual specialization in response to market forces also leads to human capital overlap, or shared expertise among co-workers, which may have positive and negative impacts on the firm. Using a novel approach that draws on longitudinal data from the Utah real estate industry, we examine these forces empirically and find that task-specific human capital does benefit firms, even after widespread negative market shocks. Overlap also benefits firms, though it is a substitute for task specificity rather than a complement. 

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