Organizational socialization tactics : Determining the relative impact of context, content, and social tactics

Facilitating new hires’ adjustment through socialization tactics is critical to maximizing the effectiveness of recruitment and selection. The aim of the current study is to extend past research by examining the relative influence of context, content, and social tactics on proximal socialization outcome variables. Learning about the organization, the work team, and the job as well as role innovation were examined as our proximal outcomes. The sample consisted of 195 recent college graduates in the early stage of their careers. This sample was chosen because entry is when socialization is especially malleable. Dominance analysis (an approach to compare the relative strength of predictor variables) results showed that social tactics were the strongest predictor of all learning variables, whereas content tactics were the strongest predictor of role innovation.