Newcomers' international experience backgrounds and contributions to team performance

This paper examines the relationship between new team members' international experience backgrounds and subsequent contributions to team performance at the first year of team membership. It is argued, that individuals' experiential backgrounds can range from narrow careers in single national contexts to broad careers in multiple international settings, with different developmental effects on newcomers' knowledge, competencies, and subsequent potentials to successfully contribute to team performance. Importantly, the experiential composition of the entire team moderates these relationships in such a way that newcomers' broad international backgrounds constitute valuable inputs of new knowledge and perspectives in experientially homogeneous and long tenured teams. A set of hypotheses was tested on a longitudinal multilevel dataset from seven consecutive seasons of German Bundesliga football (2005-2012) and provided support for our predictions. Implications of these findings are discussed together with future research directions.