Research On The Influence Mechanism Of Social Media Use At Work On Newcomers’ Organizational Socialization

With the unique post-95 and post-00 generation of newcomers pouring into the workplace,on one hand,many enterprises are facing high turnover rate of the new generation of employees,"fresh blood" can not play the "oxygen production function" and other management problems,how to quickly and effectively realize the newcomers’ organizational socialization has undoubtedly become a topic of common concern in academia and practice.On the other hand,in line with the increasingly developed and popular social media technology,as the indigenous people of the mobile internet era,the newcomers’ socialization will inevitably be affected by the use of social media.Therefore,social media use at work is bound to provide new impetus for the successful socialization of the new generation staff.However,there is little discussion in academia about whether and how social media use at work affects the newcomers’organizational socialization.Based on this,this paper introduces the Communication Visibility Theory and selects information visibility and network visibility as mediating variables to construct a theoretical model of how social media use at work affects newcomers’organizational socialization(task mastery and organizational identity),and further discusses the mechanism of interaction between these relationships.This study comprehensively uses the literature research and questionnaire survey method,collects questionnaires through three time points,selects newcomers graduated in 2021 from multiple industries as research objects,obtains a total of 248 research samples,and uses statistical tools such as SPSS 23.0 and Mplus 7.0 for data analysis and model testing.The results show that:(1)Social media use at work can positively affect the newcomers’ task mastery,which is conducive to the improvement of the "learning" oriented socialization outcome of task mastery;(2)Social media use at work positively affects the newcomers’ organizational identity,that is,it can promote the enhancement of the "assimilation-oriented" socialization result of organizational identity;(3)Social media use at work positively affects the newcomers’ task mastery level by enhancing the information visibility and network visibility within the organization;(4)Social media use at work has a positive impact on the newcomers’organizational identity by enhancing the information visibility and network visibility within the organization.This study has important implications for both theory and practice.Theoretically,first,this study focused on social media use at work,can enriches the antecedent research of newcomers’organizational socialization from the perspective of technology application in organizational management context.Second,the results of socialization are measured from the perspectives of "learning" and "assimilation",which expands the research on the consequences of social media in the field of organizational management.Third,from the perspective of communication visibility,which can reflect the uniqueness of social media,this study helps to reveals the "black box" that social media use at work affects the newcomers’ organizational socialization,and deepens the understanding of the Communication Visibility Theory,enriches the application context of the theory.In practice,first,for organizations,they should widely introduce and promote the use of social media tools such as WeChat,Enterprise WeChat and DingTalk,encourage and develop employees to use social media actively,reasonably and effectively at work.Second,for leaders,they should become familiar with and master the effective use of social media as soon as possible,and proactively demonstrate and encourage behaviors that contribute to increased levels of information visibility and network visibility.Finally,for newcomers,they should take the initiative to promote their own socialization,strengthen communication and interaction with colleagues,seek visible information,actively pay attention to and understand the relationship network between colleagues,etc.,so as to realize the organizational socialization as soon as possible.