Making Things Happen: Self- Leadership and Newcomers Socialisation

Abstract

Organisational socialisation scholars endlessly call for investigations on individuals’ self-initiated activities during the transition into a new workplace. The current study aims to discover newcomers as active agents of their socialisation, through identifying the impact of newcomers’ self-leadership on their socialisation into a new workplace. The present study was conducted with hundred and nineteen newcomers (male = 68, female = 51) who have less than one-year work experience in the current organisation working in the banking sector of Sri Lanka. Hierarchical multiple regression was utilised to analyse the data. Results indicated that the three-component of self-leadership: behaviour-focused strategies, natural rewards strategies, and cognitive thought strategies had a significant impact on newcomers socialisation, and these three components of self-leadership explain 35.9% of the variance in newcomers socialisation. Newcomers’ profile variables (gender, marital status, age, and type of appointment) have no influence either on the three components of self-leadership or organisational socialisation. This study, by identifying the impact of the three parts of self- leadership on newcomers’ socialisation in Sri Lankan context extends the organisational socialisation literature and help both organisation and newcomers to understand individuals’ role in the socialisation process.