Socialization Process of Incumbent Newcomers: Job Change and Cognitive Coping Strategy

Research in organizational socialization has primarily focused on newcomers who first entering an organization or taking a new job while the definition of organizational socialization has never been limited to complete newcomers but to all employees going through their career passages. Therefore, this paper attempts to draw attention upon incumbent newcomers who are not new to the organization but forced to change roles or location and their cognitive coping strategy. It is assumed that these incumbent newcomers who have gone through prior socialization stage and remained with the organization have higher degree of proximal and distal socialization outcome. However, such positive outcome may be deteriorated due to subsequent job changes within an organization. This paper suggests that to prevent the impact of detrimental effect (e.g., negative feelings lead to bad performance), incumbent newcomers could exercise positive framing strategy to cope with such distress.