Experience as a Double-Edged Sword: The Relationship Between Prior Management Experience and Job Performance

The inter-firm mobility of managers is a common feature in modern-day employment, yet the understanding of the relationship between prior management experience and performance remains ambiguous in the literature. The received wisdom suggests that prior management experience will have either a positive or a negative influence on performance, highlighting the positive role of novice managers or managers with expertise. In contrast, this study views these perspectives as being complementary, and suggests that a positive and negative effect of experience can operate concurrently with the level of prior management experience. Using a domain-expertise lens, this study finds a curvilinear U-shaped relationship between the level of prior management experience and performance, which implies that both novice and highly experienced managers have a positive effect on performance. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that the curvilinear U-shaped relationship is more pronounced when prior management experience is more closely related to the focal job. The main contribution of this study is to reconcile some of the ambiguity in the literature by providing a nuanced conceptualization of how and why prior management experience impacts performance.