The impact of developmental job experience on job performance: The importance of team context

Abstract

Drawing on social resources theory, we examine the impact of developmental job experience (DJE) on employees' job performance and the role of the team context in this relationship. In a multisource, multiwave dataset of 354 employees working on 40 teams in seven Chinese companies, we find that DJE has a positive indirect relationship with job performance through increasing employees' information and support seeking. This positive indirect relationship is stronger for employees on teams with a high average DJE and low variance in DJE; it is significantly weaker for employees on teams with a low average DJE and a high variance in DJE. These results reveal that the work and team contexts play important roles in the relationship between DJE and employees' work outcomes.