Organizational Tenure and Employee Performance

Abstract

Previous research has investigated the relationship between organizational tenure and performance by focusing primarily on organizational tenure of the individual employee. We propose that this approach is limited because organizational tenure should be conceptualized as relating to multiple entities including teams and their leaders. As predicted, analysis of two objective performance indicators of 1,753 employees working with 250 leaders of natural work teams in a financial services company revealed that, beyond employee organizational tenure, team leader organizational tenure and team organizational tenure diversity had positive incremental effects on employee performance. Moreover, the positive impact of employee organizational tenure was less pronounced in teams with high rather than low tenure diversity. Our findings suggest that organizations’ capacity to promote performance will be limited if they focus on organizational tenure of an individual, while neglecting the ways in which performance is shaped by organizational tenure related to multiple entities within a team.

Managing diverse teams by enhancing team identification: The mediating role of perceived diversity

“…Nevertheless, realizing the promise of team diversity has proven itself to be an intricate challenge, as a large body of evidence has shown that both objective and perceived diversity can also result in negative or non-significant effects on team outcomes (Bell, 2007;Hoever, van Knippenberg, van Ginkel & Barkema, 2012;Joshi & Roh, 2009;Stahl, Maznevski, Voigt & Jonsen, 2010;Steffens, Shemla, Wegge, & Diestel, 2014;van Knippenberg & Schippers, 2007;Wegge, Roth, Neubach, Schmidt & Kanfer, 2008). Hence, leveraging the potential that this diversity entails has become a key concern for managers.…”

Flexibility, labour retention and productivity in the EU

“…Length of job tenure has been found to be positively associated with productivity, possibly because it leads to increased employee commitment and the creation of firm specific skills and knowledge (e.g. Auer et al, 2005;Dearden et al, 2006;Ng and Feldman 2010;Steffens et al, 2014). On the other hand, if tenure is extended as a consequence of fixed-term contracts being renewed, the affected workers may become demoralised and less committed, which might have negative implications for productivity.…”

Team Turnover and Task Conflict: A Longitudinal Study on the Moderating Effects of Collective Experience

“…Human capital resource has been operationalized, for example, as tenure, experience, and education, with tenure and experience (which is a kind of tenure) being the most commonly used measures (Nyberg, Moliterno, Hale, & Lepak, 2014). Tenure, or more specifically, organizational tenure, indicates the time that an individual has spent with an organization (Steffens, Shemla, Wegge, & Diestel, 2014) or the length of employment within an organization (Ng & Feldman, 2010). When aggregated to the team level, organizational tenure describes the average work experience and job-related knowledge of the members of that team (Ng & Feldman).…”

“…Specifically, longer-tenured employees have greater organization-specific knowledge, including information about the functioning of the organization and its strategic direction, policy, rules, culture, and stakeholders (e.g., clients; Ng & Feldman, 2010). Longer-tenured employees also have a better understanding of the organization's expectations of employees' roles and responsibilities (Chatman, 1989;Steffens et al, 2014) and tend to perform more effectively (Ng & Feldman). Consistent with these individual-level arguments and based upon CET theory (Nyberg & Ployhart, 2013), our expectation is that team organizational tenure attenuates the negative effects of team turnover (in terms of task conflict).…”

“…The higher the level of organizational tenure within a team, the more organization-specific experience and knowledge the team possesses, which, in turn, helps the team operate more effectively within an organization (Bell et al, 2011;Steffens et al, 2014). Work teams with high organizational tenure may know how to avoid or overcome obstacles to performance better (Steffens et al) and how to access limited organizational resources, such as money, equipment, or infrastructure (Bell et al;Ashforth, Joshi, Anand, & O'Leary-Kelly, 2013).…”