The reasoning behind: why organizational newcomers add people to their personal networks – an exploratory study

When starting a new job, newcomers cope with high amount of uncertainty in order to learn the tasks and expectations of their work, cultural norms, and achieve a successful membership in the organization. Recently, there was an increase in the interest in the relational view in the literature on the socialization of newcomers as there is firm empirical evidence that coworkers and managers are sharing responsibility for successful socialization of newcomers. The purpose of this study is to add additional insights into the relational socialization approach and explore the reasons newcomers have, to add people to their personal network in the onboarding process. The concept of personal network in socialization literature refers to clusters of people joined by a variety of links and sees a newcomer as a part of social entity of relationships between people rather than an individual in isolation from others. Through a set of in-depth interviews with newly hired employees, newcomers report how, when and why they decided to add various colleagues into the social networks that made up their workplace. Preliminary results show that most people are added into personal networks in working related encounters and share some common personal traits and characteristics, also known as homophily. This appears to be the primary driver of adding people into newcomers’ personal networks.