 |
Supervisors’ Schemas: Influence on Newcomers’ Adjustment During Organizational Socialization
|
Author: Sushil Nifadkar, Georgia State U.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Organizations spend considerable efforts and resources on ensuring that new employees (or newcomers) adjust to the organization quickly and start performing. Newcomer adjustment research suggests that newcomers’ information seeking from supervisors plays a pivotal role in facilitating their adjustment and enhancing their performance. However, we know little about how supervisor behaviors may influence newcomers’ information seeking and other outcomes. To address this limitation, based on schema theory, this study proposes that supervisor behaviors shape schemas, or mental images, newcomers have about them. In turn, newcomers approach supervisors for information depending upon these schemas. In particular, two newcomers’ schemas of supervisors—those related to their warmth and competence—are proposed to shape newcomers’ adjustment, performance, and intention to stay by influencing their information seeking from supervisors. The hypothesized structural equation model was tested using survey data from two sources, newcomers and their supervisors working in Indian information technology companies, and a lagged data collection design. The primary contribution of the study lies in presenting newcomers’ warmth and competence schemas of supervisors as important factors in linking supervisor behaviors with newcomers’ information seeking, and consequently facilitating their adjustment and performance.
|
|
|
|
Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
|
|
|
|
|
|
When Resolve Falters: Poor Fit with Adviser Reduces Benefits of Newcomer Proactive Personality
|
Author: Charlice Hurst, U. of Notre Dame
Author: John Kammeyer-Mueller, U. of Minnesota
Author: Beth Ann Livingston, U. of Iowa
Author: Tianna Barnes, Carlson School of Management
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The importance of newcomer proactive personality to adjustment is a well- established finding. However, there may be cases in which proactivity is not an advantage. In this study, we investigated whether the benefits of proactive personality are limited by newcomers’ perceptions of similarity to their advisor. We surveyed 179 first-year PhD students upon entry into their program and then biweekly for two months. We found that the benefits of proactive personality were dampened when advisees’ initial impression was that their values, personality, and interests differed substantially from their advisor. Proactive personality had a less positive effect on newcomer pride and role clarity and a less negative effect on newcomer social isolation when perceived similarity was low. These effects started early and persisted—there was great rank order stability across time in pride, role clarity, and social isolation. These results suggest that organizations that wish to get the most from proactive newcomers should not only attend to newcomers’ proactive tendencies, but also to their perceptions of similarity to their supervisors.
|
|
|
|
Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
|
|
|
|
|
The role of supervisor trust and support for authenticity on newcomers’ creativity and adjustment
|
Author: Francesco Montani, Montpellier Business School
Author: Lucas Dufour, Montpellier Business School
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
This study addresses how and under what conditions newcomers with high creative self-perceptions can adjust to their new roles in the organization. We integrate self-verification and self-concept theories with past socialization literature to theorize that supervisors’ perceptions of newcomer creativity enable newcomers holding strong creative self-perceptions to adjust successfully at work, if supervisors trust their newcomers and provide support for their authentic self-expression. Accordingly, we propose a dual-stage moderated mediation model in which a) newcomer creative self-perceptions interact with supervisor trust to trigger supervisor creative perceptions; and b) supervisor creative perceptions, in turn, interact with supervisor support to influence adjustment outcomes (i.e., task performance, job satisfaction, and stress symptoms). A two-wave, multisource study of 146 newcomer–supervisor dyads provides support for our predictions, suggesting that high levels of supervisor trust and support for authenticity serve as moderating conditions allowing supervisor creative perceptions to positively mediate the relationship between newcomer creative self-perceptions and adjustment.
|
|
|
|
Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
|
|
|
|
|
|
It Takes Work: How Micro-Processes of Socialisation Construct Newcomers’ Identification in Teams
|
Author: Emma Perriton, Aarhus U.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
As all organisations must face the socialisations of their newcomers, increasingly they too must ensure that individuals come to identify with the working group they belong to. By a longitudinal ethnography over a two-and-a- half-year stretch in two knowledge-intensive organisations, I explore how newcomers’ identification process are implicated in processes of socialisation in two self-managing teams. The study demonstrates how the distance between newcomers and experienced team members make newcomers engage in ‘identification work’; participatory behaviours that make them more like their fellow experienced team members and fosters identification with their team. Existing team members correspondingly engage in ‘socialisation work’, behaviours that either hinder or foster the socialisation process of newcomers. Reflecting the norms and values in the teams, the team also determines acceptance mechanisms, by which newcomers become considered as full team members. Together, these relational micro-processes of socialisation construct how newcomers’ come to identify with their team. This research adds to and holds implications for the existing literatures on identification and socialisation by showing that they are inextricably intertwined in demonstrating the practices team members collectively engage in when constructing newcomers’ identification in teams.
|
|
|
|
Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
|
|
|
|
|