Socialization content and adjustment outcome: A longitudinal study of Chinese employees beginning their career

We explored the trajectories of change and dynamic associations between socialization content and adjustment outcome of Chinese people embarking on their career. We conducted a 3-wave longitudinal survey to measure what career starters learnt and how they adjusted to the workplace and organization during the initial 7 months after organizational entry. The findings suggest that socialization content, task performance, and affective commitment increased, and job satisfaction decreased over time. The faster that newcomers learn a task, the faster their performance improves. For those Chinese employees who worked in both state-owned and private organizations, the sooner they understood social relationships in the organization, the faster they formed affective commitment. In this study we explain how employees develop these skills in China, and it is one of the few studies in which an examination has been carried out within the Chinese organizational context into what newcomers learn, their adjustment process, and their dynamic relations.