Organizations increasingly rely on internal mobility as a strategic tool to enhance workforce flexibility and address staffing challenges. Despite the critical role of internal movers’ integration in realizing mobility benefits, research has largely overlooked this process, assuming movers integrate immediately due to their existing capital including organizational knowledge and networks. However, integration is neither seamless nor guaranteed, and our understanding of this critical process remains limited. Drawing on human and social capital theory, we investigate how movers’ individual capital influences their integration process, and how disruptions to team collective capital create challenges during transitions. Specifically, we propose that three types of capital—mobility experience, network centrality, and pre-entry interactions—accelerate integration, while simultaneous entry of multiple movers may hinder this process. Analysis of longitudinal data, combining email exchange records and mobility records, largely supported our hypotheses. Our findings advance understanding of internal mobility by illuminating the integration process, identifying critical pre-entry factors that explain integration dynamics, and revealing how different types of capital distinctly shape the integration process.
