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Despite the increasingly growing empirical research on leader humor, the critical issue of how and when leader humor affects newcomer adjustment was largely overlooked. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between leader humor and newcomer adjustment. Based on social information processing theory, the authors identify newcomers' role breadth self-efficacy (RBSE) as the mediator and suggest that newcomers' cognitive flexibility moderates the effects.

Data were obtained from a 2-wave sample of 195 newcomers. The authors utilized the PROCESS procedure developed by Hayes to assess the hypothesized moderated mediation model.

The findings showed that leader humor could boost newcomers' RBSE which, in turn, was beneficial to newcomer adjustment. Besides, newcomers' cognitive flexibility plays a moderating role in the relationship between leader humor and newcomers' RBSE.

This study utilized a cross-sectional research design, making the design difficult to obtain causal conclusions. Moreover, the data were all based on self-reports from newcomers, which may raise a concern of common method bias.

This paper extends the literature on leader humor and newcomer adjustment by treating RBSE as the mediator and newcomers' cognitive flexibility as the moderator. This study is one of several empirical studies to test the link between leader humor and newcomer adjustment.

Substantial research has examined the pivotal role of ethical leadership in generating employee outcomes. To date, though, little is known about the relationship between ethical leadership and newcomers' adjustment. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this gap by examining the effect of ethical leadership on newcomers' adjustment. In doing so, the authors highlighted positive emotions of newcomers as a mediating mechanism that explains the aforementioned association.

Data were drawn from a two-wave sample of 271 newcomers. The hypotheses were tested by using hierarchical regression analyses and Hayes' PROCESS macro.

The results demonstrated that ethical leadership affects employees' positive emotions which, in turn, positively relates to newcomers' adjustment. Additionally, newcomers' social comparison orientation moderated the effect of ethical leadership on newcomers' positive emotions.

The research uses a correlational research design, making it difficult to derive causal inferences from the data. Moreover, the data we obtained on the variables were all based on employees' self-reports, which might inflate the relationship between some of the variables.

To the best of the knowledge, this is the first study that illustrates the role of ethical leadership in enhancing both newcomers’ positive emotions and adjustment.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the potential effects of organizational socialization on organizational-level outcomes and to demonstrate that organizational socialization is an important human resource (HR) practice that should be included in research on strategic human resource management (SHRM) and should be part of a high-performance work system (HPWS).

This paper reviews the research on SHRM and applies SHRM theory and the ability-motivation-opportunity model to explain how organizational socialization can influence organizational outcomes. The implications of psychological resource theories for newcomer adjustment and socialization are described and socialization resources theory is used to explain how organizational socialization can influence different indicators of newcomer adjustment.

An integration of SHRM theory and organizational socialization research indicates that organizational socialization can influence organizational outcomes (operational and financial) through newcomer adjustment (human capital, motivation, social capital, and psychological capital variables) and traditional socialization/HR outcomes such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, job performance and reduced turnover.

In this paper the authors describe the socialization resources that organizations can use to facilitate newcomer adjustment to achieve newcomer and organizational outcomes.

This is one of the first papers to integrate the organizational socialization literature with SHRM theory and to explain how organizational socialization can influence organizational outcomes.

Substantial research has examined the pivotal role of supervisor positive humor in generating employee outcomes. To date, though, little is known about the relationship between supervisor humor and newcomers’ adjustment. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this gap by examining the effect of supervisor positive humor on newcomers’ adjustment. In doing so, the authors highlighted relational identification with the supervisor as a mediating mechanism that explains the aforementioned association.

Data were drawn from 117 newcomers. In order to collect the data the authors used the snowball method. Also, hierarchical regression analysis was conducted.

The results demonstrated that supervisor positive humor affects employees’ relational identification with the supervisor which, in turn, positively relates to newcomers’ adjustment.

Data were collected using a cross-sectional design and, therefore, the authors cannot directly assess causality. Moreover, the authors used self-report measures which may strengthen the causal relationships.

To the best of the knowledge, this is the first study that illustrates the role of supervisor humor in enhancing both newcomers’ relational identification and adjustment.

The majority of organizational newcomers have prior work experience. Organizational socialization tactics are less effective for such “experienced newcomers”, relative to graduate newcomers. Hence experienced newcomers tend to rely on their own actions to become socialized. The aim of this article is to assess and potentially extend the range of adjustment strategies identified as being used by experienced newcomers themselves to achieve positive adjustment.

Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 86 experienced newcomers entering a professional services organization.

Nineteen strategies emerged, with seven newly identified in this research. These are compared with strategies found in past research.

HR, and the managers and colleagues of newcomers can use the strategies identified and categorized here to encourage newcomers to use organizationally‐appropriate behaviors. Newcomers can use these strategies to help themselves achieve their own adjustment goals.

There is an increasing focus on newcomer proactive behavior in organizational socialization research, yet there are few empirically grounded developments of newcomer adjustment strategies. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to focus on what experienced newcomers report doing to help themselves adjust.

Despite the increase of recent immigrant newcomers (RINs) into the workforce over the past few years, many employers still face the challenge of successfully integrating RINs into the workplace. To this end, the purpose of this paper is to propose customized socialization tactics for RINs and highlight the role of RINs’ adjustment strategies in order to facilitate their workplace adjustment.

Drawing on immigrants, socialization, and diversity literatures, the paper develops a conceptual model of the socialization process for RINs and advances propositions to be empirically tested.

The paper proposes that customized socialization tactics by organizations and adjustment strategies by RINs would facilitate RINs’ socialization process by increasing their social integration and role performance, the factors which would ultimately help in their workplace adjustment.

The proposed customized socialization tactics add to the extant socialization literature by highlighting the crucial role firms can play in RINs’ socialization process. Additionally, the paper highlights an important role of RINs in their own socialization process.

Organizations need to employ new, different socialization tactics to help integrate RINs in the workplace. RINs may find the research outcomes useful in acknowledging their own role for successful workplace integration.

This paper presents a new way of looking at organizational socialization tactics for RINs while highlighting a role of RINs themselves, and concludes by discussing theoretical, practical, and societal implications for organizations employing RINs.

Although work engagement has become an important topic in management, relatively little attention has been given to newcomers’ work engagement in the socialization literature. The purpose of this paper is to explain how newcomers’ work engagement can fluctuate during the first year of organizational entry and the role of organizational socialization in developing and maintaining high levels of newcomers’ work engagement.

A review of the socialization literature indicates that uncertainty reduction theory has been the basis of research on socialization tactics and newcomer information-seeking both of which function by providing newcomers with information to reduce uncertainty. Socialization resources theory is used to develop a new pathway to newcomer socialization which focuses on providing newcomers with resources during the first year of organizational entry and socialization.

The uncertainty reduction pathway to newcomer socialization is narrow and limited because it primarily focuses on minimizing and reducing the negative effects of job demands rather than on providing newcomers with resources that are necessary to facilitate work engagement and socialization.

Organizations can use newcomers’ work engagement maintenance curves to map and track fluctuations in newcomers’ work engagement during the first year of organizational entry and they can conduct an audit of socialization resources to determine what resources are required to develop and maintain high levels of newcomers’ work engagement.

This paper describes newcomer work engagement maintenance curves and explains how socialization resources can be used to develop and maintain high levels of newcomers’ work engagement. A model of a new pathway to newcomer socialization is developed in which socialization resources, personal resources, and job demands influence newcomers’ work engagement and socialization outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to identify how three types of socialization tactics – content, context and social tactics – influence fit perceptions, and then how three types of fit perceptions – person–organization (P–O) fit, person–job (P–J) fit and person–group (P–G) fit – mediate the relationship between socialization tactics and positive socialization outcomes: organizational commitment, job satisfaction and intent to quit.

Responses from participants – 207 Korean youth workers – were subjected to ordinary least squares path analyses with bootstrapping to test the hypotheses.

First, this study found that socialization tactics promote youth workers’ perceived fit with organization, job, and people. Then, the mediation model showed that content socialization tactics do not influence dependent variables (socialization outcomes) through mediators (fits), while context tactics influence through perceived P–O fit and P–G fit for organizational commitment only, and social tactics through perceived P–O, P–J and P–G fit for organizational commitment, job satisfaction and intent to quit.

The results of this study suggest that institutionalized social tactics can serve as a key socialization method for new employees. In addition, youth organizations need to implement jointly formal and collective training programs with follow-up social workplace learning (e.g. mentoring and study circle) to help newcomers share the values of the organization and integrate well into it.

This study contributes for understanding the socialization process of new employees working in educational and social work fields and role of fit perception between socialization tactics and their career successes.

The purpose of this paper is to identify extant training needs for preparing supervisors to support newcomers’ organizational socialization and to develop a research agenda concerning aspects that conduce to making supervisors efficacious in the process of organizational socialization.

A review of the literature on the development of socialization agents for organizational socialization generally indicates that relatively minimal research has been undertaken on this topic. Most articles have focused on the effects of organizational socialization on other variables – such as newcomers’ work outcomes, turnover intention and organizational commitment. The review was conducted in light of this phenomenon. It is based on the structured literature review method, per Rocco, Stein and Lee (2003).

Supervisor training is suggested as a means for enhancing organizational socialization. However, supervisor training is not often studied in organizational socialization research. Therefore, the verification of the impact of supervisor training on organizational socialization is required. Given the proposed research agenda, identifying the impact of supervisor training on different areas of organizational socialization domains and inspiring increased interest on supervisor training as an effective program for organizational socialization are logical outcomes.

The concept of socialization is used in broad areas of research, such as education, military and engineering. However, it was reviewed here vis-à-vis human resource development (HRD). Therefore, the focus was on the notion of organizational socialization, which is appropriate for employee training development. The concept of organizational socialization in this paper, therefore, was delimited, as it failed to include all meanings of socialization. This paper sought to review all studies related to organizational socialization. However, some research was not considered and, thus, not discussed in this paper. This was because of time and resource constraints. The author sorted previous studies by personal standards and, thus, may have inadvertently included non-germane or excluded relevant citations.

Supervisory training for organizational socialization can be proposed as a potential area for leading to an effective organizational socialization program. So HRD professionals should study further about the topic and develop such programs. Increased attention on supervisor training for organizational socialization may increase the number and quality of supervisor training programs. Such studies would augment HRD professionals’ knowledge about organizational socialization and eventually enhance performance in organizations.

This paper can expand the area in which social learning theory can be applied. According to Bandura and Walters (1977), the social learning theory posits that learning new behaviors can usually be acquired by observing and imitating others. This implies that newcomers emulate other organizational members to adapt to the organization and their assigned roles. In this process, supervisors can play a key role through showing them the appropriate behaviors, supporting their learning and providing appropriate feedback. Presumably, then, new employees may perform better if supervisors receive training on crucial socialization efforts.

Significantly, socialization agents are uniquely situated to greatly impact the organizational socialization process of newcomers. Among the socialization agents, supervisors garner enormous influence on newcomers’ organizational socialization. However, relatively few studies investigated the training of supervisors for organizational socialization.

With organizations hiring from increasingly diverse labor markets, this study aims to examine the implications of newcomers’ individual differentiation for their group identification. The paper proposes and tests a self-verification process in which individual differentiation predicts group identification through role innovation under positive social feedback on innovation (moderated mediation). Simultaneously, a self-categorization pathway is examined of the indirect negative influence of individual differentiation on group identification through role modeling (mediation).

Survey data were collected at three time points from 161 UK university alumni.

The analyses support a self-verification pathway: newcomers with high individual differentiation report higher group identification via role innovation only when they receive positive feedback on their innovative actions. However, there was no support for a self-categorization pathway, with no indirect relationship found between individual differentiation and group identification via role modeling.

HR practitioners and managers who are responsible for helping newcomers adjust should consider newcomers’ individual differentiation. Specifically, newcomers with high individual differentiation may more successfully navigate their transition and identify with their workgroup when given appropriate support, such as positive social feedback on their innovative actions.

The study extends organizational socialization research by focusing on when newcomers with high individual differentiation may experience group identification. The findings highlight the important role of positive social feedback on group identification; this suggests a potential means by which newcomers with high individual differentiation can settle successfully.