Socialization pathways: A longitudinal investigation of newcomers' onboarding profiles

Socialization is the cornerstone of employee integration and adaptation to a new job, allowing new employees to learn and internalize critical components of their organization's structure, role requirements, and social dynamics. This study aimed to improve our understanding of the process through which new employees ( N = 932; M age = 40.11; 58.5% female) are socialized within a new job by identifying profiles, or pathways, characterized by both global and domain-specific task, workgroup, and organizational socialization experiences. More precisely, this study longitudinally monitors the stability of the nature of, and membership into, these profiles over an 18-month period, and their associations with theoretically and practically relevant predictors and outcomes. Five stable profiles were identified: Well-Adapted Social & Task-Driven , Ill-Adapted Task-Driven , Moderately Adapted , Well-Adapted Organizationally Driven and Perfectly Adapted . Generally, newcomers prioritizing more than one socialization domain displayed better global socialization experiences, although a profile driven by organizational socialization was as beneficial in the short term as one driven by workgroup and task socialization. The worst profile was driven solely by task socialization. Newcomers' workplace affective commitment, specifically organization, task, supervisor and coworker commitments, were positively associated with membership into more desirable socialization profiles, albeit distinctively. Profile membership was associated with different patterns of adaptation in terms of work-related outcomes (i.e., performance, turnover intentions, job engagement, emotional exhaustion) and transitions to different socialization pathways. Research and practical implications of the identified socialization pathways are discussed.