Can You Go Home Again? Performance Assistance Between Boomerangs and Incumbent Employees
研究回聘员工（即再次被雇用的前员工）与在职同事之间的绩效协助行为，发现回聘员工比新员工更主动协助同事，但同事并未给予回聘员工同等回报。
Boomerangs, that is, rehires, should have advantages over other new hires when integrating into an organization due to their familiarity with the work context and their pre-existing relationships. However, research suggests that the effects of hiring boomerangs may not be straightforwardly positive. To better understand these effects, we investigate how boomerangs’ social integration into a work team differs from that of other new hires due to their pre-existing relationships and how those relationships shape their and incumbents’ competence and motivation to provide assistance for collective performance. We theorize and find that boomerangs, compared with new hires, exhibit more performance assistance toward incumbent former and incumbent new colleagues. In contrast, incumbent former colleagues do not direct their performance assistance toward boomerangs, contrary to our prediction, nor do incumbent new colleagues. This study contributes to the nascent literature on boomerangs and the literature on job mobility by finding evidence that prior relationships condition the behavior of both boomerangs and incumbents. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.16685 .