Abstract:
Newcomers make the transition from being organizational outsiders to being
insiders. During this process employees learn organizational environment and
intergrade themselves into that environment. Previous studies much investigated
the role of organization in the socialization/adjustment process, but less investigated
the individual’s role in that process. This study aimed to investigate the role
of newcomers’ proactive behavior in the adjustment process among 98 school
teachers in Northern Province of Sri Lanka. This study employed PLS-SEM
with SmpartPLS to test proposed hypotheses. This study found that newcomers’
engagement in proactive behaviours such as feedback seeking, information seeking,
relationship building and positive framing positively influence their adjustment
(social integration). These findings suggest that individuals need to be proactive
and engage in positive framing, information seeking, relationship building, and
feedback seeking to become acceptable members of the organization and be
successful in their career. Also organizations need to encourage newcomers to
engage in proactive behavior through maintaining appropriate organizational
culture to get better outcomes from their employees. Further, this study contributes
to the literature by investigating the influence of proactive behaviour in the
socialization process among school teachers which is the population unnoticed in
the socialization literature.
