537: Navigating Transition Across Teams: Newcomer Attributes, Centrality Dynamics and Transition Success (16676)

Internal movers within organizations undergo a re-adaptation process after transitioning to new teams. We theorize that the growth in a mover’s centrality in the new team after entry is a process involving both adapting and gaining informal status. Prior research on newcomer socialization has primarily focused on post-entry factors that facilitate adaptation in a static manner, limiting our understanding of a more effective way that can predict post-entry adaptation dynamics: team newcomers’ pre-entry characteristics. To address this issue, we integrate insights from expectation states theory with the literature on newcomer socialization, exploring why some team newcomers have centrality advantages initially and why others demonstrate a faster increase in their centrality within the new team. Our expectations are supported by a rich dataset, including personnel records, email communications, and performance data from a healthcare organization in the Netherlands. Our results provide evidence that internal movers’ within-team centrality is positively linked to their performance. Further, by tracking them for nine months following their exact entry into a new team, we found that explicit social characteristics of newcomers (i.e., higher education, coordinated function, and formal leadership position), which are visible to team members, affect only the initial level of centrality. Implicit competence characteristics (i.e., prior transition experience, and centrality in old teams), which take time to become noticeable through interactions, are predictive of a more rapid increase in centrality in the new team. Our findings evidenced that explicit and implicit characteristics function differently over time. We also contribute to the newcomer literature by highlighting the importance of newcomers’ prior experiences in shaping their future developments.

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