Mobility scholars commonly attribute employees’ post-mobility productivity loss to disruptions associated with the social facets of firm-specific knowledge such as their familiarity with the team. We extend this work in two important ways. First, we shift the focus to examine the effect of firm-specific knowledge and routines stored in a firm’s technological structure. Second, we maintain that the very mechanisms that reduce employees’ post-move productivity – the need to learn and adapt to a new task environment – promote their novel knowledge integration after the move. Our results demonstrate that while a transition from a concentrated technological structure to a broad structure reduces mobile employees’ post-move productivity, it increases their post-move learning, resulting in the novel integration of their knowledge with that of the new employer. Conversely, moving from a broad technological structure to a concentrated one results in more post-move productivity but fewer novel integrations. Moreover, we suggest that due to learning myopia, experts experience a smaller loss in post-move productivity but are less likely to create novel integration. We further posit that the mobile employees’ knowledge distance from that of the hiring firm has a nonlinear moderating effect on the relationship between technological structural dissimilarities and post-move innovative performance. By juxtaposing employee specialization and knowledge distance with technological structural dissimilarities, we assert that individual characteristics might also explain transaction costs and learning opportunities following a move. Overall, our study challenges the existing theory and findings on the performance implications of employee mobility, while opening up unique opportunities for future research.
