Suchergebnisse

How does the bond between the newcomer and the organization develop over time? Process research on temporal patterns of newcomer's early commitment formation has been very scarce because theory and appropriate longitudinal research designs in this area are lacking. From extant research we extract three process-theoretical accounts regarding how the newcomer adjustment process evolves over time: (1) Learning to Love; (2) Honeymoon Hangover; and (3) High Match, Moderate Match, or Low Match. From these scenarios we develop a taxonomy of newcomer adjustment scenarios. Further, we empirically verify these different scenarios by examining naturally occurring "trajectory classes," which are found to display strengthening, weakening, or stabilizing of the employee–organization linkage. For this, we use a sample of 72 Ph.D. graduates whose organizational commitment history was recorded in their first 25 consecutive weeks of new employment. In closing, we discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the scenario-based approach.

Successful organizational change requires substantial efforts from both the leaders and recipients of change. After a long tradition of focusing on change leaders, academics now increasingly focus on the role of change recipients. The current literature on recipients, however, offers mostly binary categorizations of their roles in change (e.g., supportive vs. unsupportive) obtained from questionnaires. Such an approach does not reveal how events can cause shifts in recipients' role taking during a change initiative. Actors' roles change and are changed by change events. We adopted an assisted sensemaking approach using a narrative methodology to study recipients' various storylines by which they construct and reconstruct their own multiple roles throughout change. Eighty participants were asked to tell the retrospective story of their experience of, and role taking in, a top-down change initiative as if they were crafting chapters of a book. Analysis and classification of these individual stories yielded five underlying composite narratives, each representing typical shifts in perceived role taking by recipients during a change initiative. This study highlights and illustrates how recipients' role taking is a complex, adaptive, and social process.