The portability of career‐long work experience: Propensity to trust as a substitute for valuable work experience

The aims of this paper are to expand understanding on the portability of work experience and to understand how an employee's level of propensity to trust interplays with perceived value of previous career‐long work experience to affect on‐the‐job performance.

A sample of 127 new employees of three newly opened locations of a national full‐service restaurant chain were surveyed during the orientation phase of their jobs. This was followed up three‐four weeks later by job performance ratings from supervisors.

The higher the perceived value of previous work experience the stronger the relationship between industry work experience and job performance. Also, the higher the perceived value of previous work experience the weaker the relationship between propensity to trust and job performance.

Because this study concentrated on a single firm in a single industry, generalizability to other industries may suffer.

Employees that seek to find value in their current jobs may be more valuable in their future jobs. Also, employees who lack valuable prior work experiences will need to rely more on their propensity to trust other employees if they want to perform well at their new jobs.

The study explains the reasoning behind prior inconsistencies in the work experience‐job performance literature by introducing the concept of perceived value of previous work experience and explaining how this relates to propensity to trust in a newcomer relationship.