When in Rome, Feel as the Romans Feel: An Emotional Model of Organizational Socialization

Abstract

Organizational socialization literature has long emphasized learning organizational culture upon entry. However, most previous socialization studies have largely focused on learning job skills, such as role clarity and task mastery. Focusing on emotional culture, the author provides a review about the roles of emotions in an organizational socialization context. Further, drawing upon the organizational socialization and emotion literature, the author builds a theoretical model, an emotional model of organizational socialization highlighting how newcomers adjust to the emotional culture within an organization, which ultimately leads to successful organizational socialization. This article provides new conceptual insights into the roles of newcomers’ adjustment to an emotional culture in a socialization context, providing fruitful ways for future empirical testing.

Extending organizational socialization theory: Empirical evidence from volunteer work for refugees in France and Australia

“…role complexity, pressure) that can interfere with individuals’ learning ability. A second, more normative, perspective focuses on the extent to which newcomers learn about what emotions are acceptable in their new organization and how to adjust their own emotions to create a better fit (Choi, 2018; Guo, 2019). Third, research has taken a process perspective (e.g.…”

Leader Behavioral Integrity and Employee In-Role Performance: The Roles of Coworker Support and Job Autonomy

“…Previous studies showed that employees seek job-relevant resources from organizational insiders [59][60][61][62][63]; the most prominent example of organizational insiders that employee can find are their coworkers. Coworkers provide important job-relevant resources such as information on role demand as well as technical, and normative information; these types of information are beneficial for employees' in-role performance [40,61,64]. When employees have a high degree of job autonomy, they have fewer restrictions in utilizing the job resources that they received from their supervisor in the form of consistent feedback and communication, which are marks of behavioral integrity.…”

Institutionalized affect in organizations: Not an oxymoron

“…Socialization may entail learning (if only implicitly; Choi, 2018) how to utilize: (1) the framing rules by making sense of given situations – including one’s own and others’ affect – in certain preferred ways (cf. “organizational emotion [affect] scripts”; Gibson, 2008: 277); (2) the feeling and display rules by engaging in emotional labor (i.e.…”

“…The two primary means of socialization are formal practices and more informal on-the-job training. Formal practices reflect “institutionalized socialization”, where newcomers are grouped together for training purposes, segregated from other organizational members for a defined period, trained by veterans, follow a fixed sequence of steps and timelines, and are encouraged to adopt an organizationally preferred sense of self (Choi, 2018; Van Maanen and Schein, 1979). Schweingruber and Berns (2005: 681) describe a week-long “emotional training” program (the company’s term) for door-to-door book salespeople.…”