The long walk together: The role of institutionalized socialization in shaping newcomers' future expectations about their networks

Abstract

Although a future orientation plays an important role in Van Maanen and Schein's (1979) classic conceptualization of organizational socialization tactics, human resource management practices and scholarly research tend to focus on individuals' adjustment to the present. We address this significant gap by investigating how institutionalized socialization facilitates newcomer outcomes via its impact on newcomers' expected long-term friendship and cooperation networks. Based on construal level theory, we argue that expectations about one's long-term networks reflect perceptions of the stable nature of one's current networks. A 4-wave study with two samples of newcomers in diverse Chinese organizations found that institutionalized socialization predicted positive development in the size of newcomers' current and expected networks, which in turn predicted managers' ratings of newcomers' in-role performance and extra-role behaviors in the form of altruistic helping and taking charge. The study thus documents a relatively unknown benefit of socialization on newcomers' future expectations about their social relationships and the impact on newcomers' behaviors.