CSPS Webinar on "Socializing Employees into the Organization Matters for Both Individual and Organizational Performance"
Socializing employees into the organization matters for both individual and organizational performance. To explore how supervisors socialize newly recruited civil servants, this research utilises a mixed-method approach combining 80 individual interviews and two original, large-N surveys including a vignette experiment with civil servants from Ghana’s and Nigeria’s civil services. Rather than the literature’s focus on the direct communication of organizational values, I find that supervisors rely more on seemingly mundane and informal task assignment, guidance, and feedback in socializing recruits. In addition, this task-based socialization is associated more than direct values communication with recruits’ work attitudes, and early career advancements. In fact, direct values communication alone does not matter for recruits unless task-based socialization is also provided in tandem.