Feeling Negative or Positive About Fresh Blood? Understanding Veterans' Affective Reactions Toward Newcomer Entry in Teams From an Affective Events Perspective

To meet the ever-changing work demands in today's organizations, new employees are often placed into existing work teams. Although research on organizational socialization has advanced our understanding of how newcomers adjust after joining a team, it remains largely unclear how team veterans navigate the same period of adjustment. Drawing upon affective events theory, we conceptualize newcomer entry into a team as a salient affective event that can trigger multiplex affective reactions among team veterans and ultimately shape team functioning (i.e., team processes and team performance). We propose that when a newcomer differs more from veterans in relational characteristics, such as trait likeability, veterans will have stronger negative affective reactions (i.e., stronger negative affect and weaker positive affect), whereas when the newcomer differs more from veterans in task-related characteristics, such as educational background, veterans will have stronger positive affective reactions (i.e., weaker negative affect and stronger positive affect) after newcomer entry. In addition, we propose that team performance prior to newcomer entry attenuates the strength of the relationships between newcomer-veteran dissimilarities and veteran affective reactions. We tested our hypotheses in a laboratory simulation (Study 1) and a field survey study (Study 2). The results provided support for our theoretical model that the entry of a newcomer can bring multiplex affective consequences for veterans, depending on the type of newcomer dissimilarity to the team and the team's prior performance. Theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed.