The Relationship Between Employees'Organizational Socialization And Career Success

Hall maintained that: career is viewed as a long-term bundle of socialization experiences, as the person moves in, through, and out of various work-related roles over the span of his or her work life. Career is a concept that has broader meaning than socialization. Career has involved each time people move between two organizations and within one organization. Organizational socialization is a process in which people master necessary social knowledge and skills to perform the role in the organization. Accordingly, organizational socialization is the necessary part of the person's whole-life career.On one hand, people need to update and attain new required knowledge and skills in search of essential organizational support and information when they enter a new position, team, department or organization, therefore employees can quickly adapt themselves to the new role. Many researches have discussed the process, content, tactics and individual information-seeking behavior of organizational socialization, with far-reaching conclusions found out. On the other hand, during the process of changing a job or role, people intentionally pursue a higher criteria (bigger salary package, more power and higher position) or psychological achievement, happiness and satisfaction which consist of a pursuit for career success. The research of career success is one of the hottest fields in career research, especially the predictors of career success.Greenhaus argued that organizational socialization, regarded as one part of career development stages, needed more concern of researchers. Consequently, the author hopes to examine the relationship between employees'organizational socialization and their career success. Based on the available literature, researches that directly discuss the relationship between the content of organizational socialization and the outcomes of career are very few. This thesis aims to establish a reasonable research framework by clarifying the concepts, models, theories, measurements, and try to test the relationship of organizational socialization content and employees'career success by an empirical study (survey method and statistical analysis).This thesis employs the classical six-dimension scale of OSC (organizational socialization content) proposed by Chao, O'Leary-Kelly, Wolf, Klein and Gardner(1994). The reliability and validity were tested through pilot test. The six dimensions of OSC are: values and goals, people, politics, language, history and performance proficiency. Besides, the subjective career success is measured by career satisfaction proposed by Greenhaus, Parasuraman and Wormley (1990) scale. The objective career success is measured by monthly salary and promotion times.The hypotheses are: the degree to which employees master the organizational socialization content is significantly positively correlated with subjective and objective career success separately.This study employs online survey platform to gather data by random sampling method in a large scale Panel conducted by a third-party data collector. The valid sample is 256 in total. Conclusions are drawn as follows after statistical analysis:1) The six dimensions of OSC are significantly positively correlated with the subjective career success and salary. The organizational goals and values, history and performance proficiency is significantly positively correlated with the times of promotion.2) The most two influential factors on subjective career success are goals and values as well as politics, and it remains the same when some variables (demographic variables, human capital variables and organizational characteristics) are controlled.3) Goals and values, language, and politics are fairly better predictors of objective career success compared with the other three dimensions. However, the former three factors will be less influential if human capital variables and marital status are added in the model.To sum up, the hypotheses have been confirmed. Discussions of outcomes, limitations of this study and implication for practice are also given. Furthermore, the suggestions for future research are mainly discussed in the end.