Impact of Employment on Newcomer's Values: Role of Supervisor's Transformational Leadership

Abstract

An individual's first job is likely to change his or her values, and one's first supervisor is likely to play a significant role in this value change. In a series of three longitudinal studies, we show the impact of an individual's first job on his on her values and the role of the immediate supervisor's leadership on the change in values. In the first two studies at a large engineering company (N = 244) and a bank (N = 59), we found that after one month of classroom training and eighteen months of on-the-job experience respectively, newcomer's values changed such that they showed an increase in self-enhancement values and a reduction in self-transcendence values. In the third study (N = 100) at an automobile company, we looked at the effect of on-the-job experience on newcomer's values and found a similar result. Moreover, we matched newcomer-supervisor pairs (N = 64) and found that the supervisor's transformational leadership enhanced self-transcendence values and reduced self-enhancement values of newcomers. Also, supervisor's transformational leadership enhanced newcomer-supervisor value congruence. Our studies have demonstrated that employment makes people self-centered and that transformational leadership can reverse the effect.