Newcomers in Self-Organising Task Groups: When Does a Newcomer Really Contributes To a Better Performance?

This paper describes the consequences of turnover, especially how a work group and a newcomer mutually adapt. We tested two groups, a group in which the task allocation gives space for a newcomer to fit in and a group in which this space was not available. For both groups, we tested conditions with newcomers being specialists, contributing to a specific part of the task, newcomers being generalists, being able to contribute in a global way, and a control condition with no newcomer. We studied the development of task allocation and performance. The results indicate that both the specialists and the generalists only contributed to a better performance when the task allocation provided the space for a newcomer to fit in.