Abstract:

A considerable number of college graduates enter the workforce every year. Given increasingly heightened competition, understanding how to transform college graduates into engaged and productive organizational employees is crucial. Although numerous studies on organizational socialization exist, most are generally focused on organizational control. However, as work roles become increasingly dynamic in the changing environment, successful organizational socialization requires newcomers to develop an innovative role orientation to be able to constantly shape their role in the workplace and better serve organizational goals. Drawing on the self-expression perspective, this study attempted to explore whether newcomer job crafting could facilitate role performance (i.e., task performance and creativity). Moreover, we examined how initial leader-member exchange (LMX) and individual traditionality jointly influence newcomer job crafting.
We conducted a four-wave survey among 256 newcomers from a large machinery manufacturer in China. The final matched sample size was 125. Results showed that (a) newcomer job crafting was significantly related to work engagement, which in turn, resulted in high levels of task performance and creativity; (b) LMX positively affected job crafting only in newcomers with high levels of traditionality; and (c) traditionality moderated the positive indirect effect of LMX on task performance and creativity via job crafting and work engagement. That is, positive indirect effects were significant in newcomers with high levels of traditionality.
Our study provides several theoretical contributions. First, we examine an employee-centered organizational socialization process from the perspective of self-expression. Second, this research develops a comprehensive newcomer job crafting model including the antecedents and consequences of newcomer job crafting. Third, we add to the employee creativity literature by highlighting how to promote newcomer creativity from the lens of job crafting. Besides its theoretical implications, this study presents practical implications on how to quickly transform new hires into productive and creative employees. Our study recommends organizations to encourage newcomers to craft their job during organizational entry to engender high levels of task performance and to tap into the creativity of new hires. However, managers should be aware that the quality of LMX is likely to be influential in promoting job crafting among newcomers with high levels of traditionality.

Key words: newcomer socialization, job crafting, task performance, creativity, leader-member exchange (LMX), traditionality