Organizational Socialization

Acclimating to the formal and informal requirements of a new job and organization is typically a complex and stressful undertaking for individuals.  Organizational socialization is a process in which the new hire makes sense of the values, abilities, expected behaviors, and social knowledge essential to their role and for participating as an organizational member (Van Maanen & Schein, 1979).  Organizations have the ability to play a critical role during socialization by providing newcomers with a variety of important information, such as organizational goals and values, history, politics, language, people, and performance proficiency.

Taking an active role in socialization benefits organizations by allowing them to have a greater influence on the perceptions being developed by the new hire, rather than the leaving the new hire to haphazardly infer important aspects of the organization’s culture.   This is important because the attitudes and beliefs that newcomers develop toward their organization have been shown to form very early and can remain relatively stable.  Taking measures to ensure a successful adjustment for new hires also benefits organizations by positively influencing both short-term and distal outcomes, such as organizational commitment, job satisfaction, social integration, role clarity, task mastery, values congruence, and fit.

Research on socialization content has demonstrated that adjusting to a new organization requires more than just information about how to perform their job well (Chao et al. 1994).  Organizational newcomer orientations are similar to training programs, but are generally more concerned with the contextual-organizational factors that influence a person’s connection to their job and less focused on task learning and performance . Incorporating knowledge of organizational goals and values into an employee’s orientation training has been shown to have a positive impact on career involvement, adaptability, and job satisfaction (Chao et al. 1994). Because organizational values have a strong effect on employee’s activities and attitudes, it is critical to examine how new hires come to learn and accept the organization’s values and goals.

References:

Chao, G. T., O’Leary-Kelly, A. M., Wolf, S., Klein, H. J., & Gardner, P. D. (1994). Organizational socialization: Its content and consequences. Journal of Applied Psychology, 79, 730 –743.

Van Maanen, J. and E. H. Schein. 1979. “Toward a Theory of Organizational Socialization.” Research in Organizational Behavior. 1:209-264

Learning Organizations: Not just for companies!

The video below is an interview with David Garvin and Amy Edmondson, both of whom are professors at Harvard Business School. They discuss what it means to be a learning organization and how companies can incorporate these learning principles to stay ahead of competition.  Although nonprofits generally operate from a paradigm of collaboration rather than competition, learning organization principles are very applicable to nonprofit in terms of  strengthening their services and outcomes.

Here are a few of the key ideas from the interview that can be applied easily to nonprofits:

How do you foster a learning organization in an organization?

• You have to have a supportive learning environment:  a climate that tolerates mistakes and errors.

• A helpful mechanism that can be employed is “Blame free reporting”, which allows staff at all levels of the organization to speak up about all types of mistakes without being penalized for their candor.  In order for an organization to become a learning organization, leadership has to help people become comfortable with the risk of addressing what doesn’t work.

• Forums for sharing knowledge and best practices:  Create formal and informal ways of reflecting on what staff have learned from past experiences, asking questions such as “what activities do we sustain” and “what do we do differently?”.

Can managers help create a learning organization culture within just their group without having the buy-in of the organization as a whole?

Yes, and it’s recommended.  Just start modeling the above principles and see how it takes off within your program/staff.

It all starts with vision: Building capacity through staff development

A 2001 study published by McKinsey & Company, entitled Effective Capacity Building in Nonprofit Organizations, outlined the role that staff development can play in enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of a nonprofit’s programs.

One of the key starting points for building capacity within an organization is for leadership to reassess the agency’s vision, mission, and strategy.  The nonprofits in the study that experienced the greatest gains in capacity were those that undertook this kind of reassessment of their aspirations and then developed a strategy to get staff on board with the newly crafted vision.

Making a concerted effort to familiarize (or reacquaint) staff with the goals and vision of the organization is an important first step in strengthening programs and services.  It should be self-evident that staff need to know the goals that they are setting out to accomplish with their work.  However, many organizations leave their staff and volunteers to haphazardly infer what is of utmost importance to both the organization and their role.

Efforts made by leadership to connect the dots between job responsibilities, performance, organizational outcomes, and organizational mission set the stage for creating a learning organization.  Involving staff and volunteers in the process of assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of programs (through surveys, focus groups, interviews, etc) can reinvigorate the culture of an organization, placing an emphasis on growing and learning rather than complacency.  Involving all levels of staff in the evaluation process as much and as early as possible is recommended to create buy-in for staff development opportunities down the line.

Designing Trainings in Nonprofits: From the gut or from the facts?

A data-driven approach towards assessing training needs for staff and/or volunteers may seem out of reach for nonprofit administrators, especially in this economic climate where nonprofits are struggling to maintain the status quo.  Trainings are often designed “from the gut”, meaning that a program administrator notices a training need and comes up with a way to address it without any type of needs assessment.  As someone who has designed trainings both “from the gut” and from the facts (aka a “needs assessment), my advice to overtaxed nonprofit administrators is to find a middle ground between intuition and a comprehensive needs assessment.  If you don’t have the time to conduct a systematic evaluation of training deficiencies (such as the process listed in this article), you can still conduct at least one or two data collection methods that can inform your training intervention.  Here are some ideas:

1) You most likely already have weekly/bi-weekly/or at least monthly meetings with your staff as individuals and/or in a group.  Come up with a few questions about training needs to ask your staff/volunteers during these already scheduled meetings.  It won’t take much extra time and your staff will feel more involved in the process of training development.

2)  Keep track of trends that occur in your formalized or informal evaluations of employee performance in regard to performance deficiencies.

3) Take a look at the job description for a position that you oversee.  Is it fairly comprehensive in regard to the knowledge, skills and abilities needed for the job?   If the responsibilities of the current job description are vague, set a time line of a few months to work with staff in these positions to flesh out the specific activities of the job.

4)  Working off of the old or revised job description, make three columns next to each item with the following headings:  formal, informal, none (in reference to current training).  Thinking about how staff are currently trained to perform each responsibility, make a check-mark in the appropriate column.

By utilizing the information from these activities, you’ll be incorporating a more systematic approach to training design without adding much work to your plate!

Happenings around San Francisco

When I am looking for something to do around town, here are a few of my go-to sites:

The Week Intro:  From gallery openings to community farming, this site is full of artsy, progressive, community-building gems.

FunCheapSF:  Want to know what is happening in and around SF on the cheap?  Well, here ya go!

The Squid List:  This is the site that told me about a re-enactment of MJ’s thriller in Dolores park a couple of years ago.  Need I say more?