Colleagues that work together move together: How co-moving among newcomers affects individual and team performance.

As teams and team membership become more dynamic, colleagues from the same prior team increasingly transition together to a new team as a cohort: a phenomenon known as co-moving. Drawing on theories of shared team experience and team receptivity, we develop a multilevel, multi-theory, and multi-period model to examine how co-moving affects individual and team performance. We theorize that co-movers carry forward proximal shared team experience which they can leverage immediately to support their own performance relative to solo movers, who must build new working relationships. However, we also theorize that co-movers’ proximal shared team experience hinders team performance, though these detrimental effects attenuate over time. We test our theory using archival data from the National Basketball Association, supplemented by qualitative interviews with individuals involved in professional basketball. Our findings reveal that co-movers exhibit better individual performance than solo movers on their new teams and in our robustness checks we find that greater shared tenure on the prior team further enhances this advantage. At the team level, teams with co-movers perform worse than teams with solo movers, and we find partial support that this disadvantage attenuates over time. Additional analyses show that co-movers’ individual performance advantage persists over time in the new team. The findings from our interviews illuminate how these processes unfold both on and off the court. Our research contributes to the literature on shared team experience and newcomer integration by highlighting a multilevel tradeoff: while co-moving benefits individuals, it can initially undermine collective performance.