Communication Medium Of Choice. Socialization Process For New Employees

This article responds to recent concerns in academia about the influnce brought by advances of information and communication techologies (ICTs) on organizational socialization. Through an analysis on newcomer information seeking, I propose that, in addition to information types, sources, and seeking tactics, factors originally existing in traditional communication contexts, ICT advances make needs for choosing media salient on parts of newcomers in information seeking processes.To solve the issue of media selection, I adopt a prevalent perspective from the filed of technology useage, and argue that the decision about media selection is relied on how newcomers perceive the technological features afforded by various media, rather than the media themselves. To identify these features, I refer to the feature classification as well as specific definitions of features offered by media synchronicity theory (MST), which suits new contexts better than theories established in traditional contexts, and explore that, with introduction of advanced ICTs (e.g. electronic communication media, such as email and instant messaging), how the evaluations of organizational newcomers on media characteristics (or technological features) vary as types of information they seek change and their organizational tenures progress. In this way, this article turns out to be the first research that responds to recent theretical concerns about changes in socialization brought by ICT advances, and brigdes the gap between information seeking and media selection. More specifically, this article argues that information types and organizational tenures could influence people's perceptions of features via the cost-benefit paradigm underlying information seeking. Furthermore, in addition to indirect impacts, information types and organizational tenures also have some direct influence on newcomer evaluations of features.In the empirical part of this article, I first devise measures of the five features proposed by MST. Based on data of 324 questionnaires, an exploratory factor analysis is conducted to test the vadility of the MST classification. Deeper still, I employ a paired t-test to identify two communication media-face-to-face and email—which exhibit significant difference in people's perceptions of each of the five featues. This finding provides me with guideline to design the method and procedure for the next step research.The second part of research requires a within-person approach to data collection and analysis. This part of research is based on data of 291 questionnaires filled by...