Research Article
The Effect of Information Seeking Activities and Feedback Sources on Job Satisfaction of Early Entrants
Published: January 1995 · Vol. 24, No. 2 · pp. 63-84
Full Text
Abstract
This study is based on the perspective that newcomers in organizational socialization are not passive but actively seek information in order to adapt to the organization. The purpose of this research is to examine how newcomers' information-seeking activities and feedback from supervisors/colleagues as socialization agents, as well as self-generated feedback, affect newcomers' job satisfaction, and furthermore, how these relationships change across different stages of organizational socialization. The results show that in the early stage, the group with active information-seeking activities exhibited higher job satisfaction than the passive group, but as they progressed to the settling-in stage, the difference in job satisfaction between the two groups was not statistically significant. Regarding the relationship between feedback sources and job satisfaction, in the early stage, regardless of information-seeking activity level, supervisor feedback had a greater impact on job satisfaction than feedback from colleagues or self-generated feedback. However, as individuals progressed to the settling-in stage, self-generated feedback was found to have a greater impact on job satisfaction. These results suggest that in organizational socialization, not only socialization strategies and agents but also the individual role of the socialization target is critically important, and that information plays a paramount role in newcomers' organizational socialization.
