Leaders often transition alongside their former subordinates to maintain established work relationships and support systems. While prior research has primarily focused on leaders as the sole scope of change during internal leader transfers, this study addresses the overlooked aspect of leaders’ co-movement with prior subordinates. We investigate the impact of leader co-movement on post-transition leadership performance. We theorize that leaders retain the colleague-specific human capital via co-movement with prior subordinates, which helps them complement the loss of location-specific human capital and perform better after the transfer. The benefit is stronger when leaders co-move to more distant job position in terms of organization structure and skill domain, as well as when leaders are in higher job level and move from higher-performing team. Furthermore, we theorize that comoving with higher proportion of prior subordinates, and with those with higher performance and longer working relationship, leads to greater performance benefit for leaders. The model was examined with personnel records from a large technology firm over a five-year period. The study provides implications for how organizations should strategically consider leader co-movement versus solo moves during internal transfer to sustain leader performance continuity.
