Socialization, Employee Proactive Behaviors

An employee starting a new job is confronted by the challenge of adapting to a new organizational culture and a new social setting. Information about how to behave is encoded in a sometimes bewildering array of contextually bound communications. To facilitate the transmission of this cultural information to organizational newcomers, most organizations invest in organization-wide orientation and onboarding programs. There are, however, limits to what an organization can do at this level. The relationship between organizational socialization efforts and newcomer adjustment levels is modest. After years of studying organizational tactics, researchers began to recognize the omission of the newcomer’s own agency in socialization models. Studies further show that an effective socialization process may facilitate this proactive adjustment, as opposed to seeing newcomers as passively receiving ...