Yikes, as a lowly humanities-based student I really wish I weren't the first to respond, but here goes. First, this reading was definitely made more interesting and palatable by reading the other article first. The six facets--as they're called here-- from the other reading were not only referenced, but confirmed in this reading. In fact, these authors confirmed that: "All six of the facets of socialization tactics were significantly correlated with satisfaction and intention to remain. All facets, except for formal facet, were significantly correlated with organizational commitment. All facets, except for formal and collective, were significantly correlated with performance. only the the sequential and investiture facets were significantly correlated with turnover" (715). This all works to confirm the authors' central finding that "show that role clarity, self-efficacy, and social acceptance mediate the relationship between newcomer
information seeking and organizational socialization tactics and socialization outcomes, including newcomer performance, work attitudes, and turnover" (718).

In othe words, the authors used role clarity, self-efficacy, and social acceptance to support that newcomers largely seek information so as to avoid uncertainty (709) when entering a new organization. This is all confirmed in Figure 1, but also makes intuitive sense. Most newcomers--in any context--want to join the new organization or group and fit in easily and quickly. This basic design goal quickly becomes a claim when we consider how to facilitate this process in our ecommunities.  Specifically, by choosing a design claim such as achieving a serial socialization process, and having older members groom newcomers, in a community the newcomers may then feel more at ease and have more access to information sooner, thereby reducing their uncertainty and achieving satisfaction of being within the organization. 

I found this paper pretty dense, but I really do find this area of theory quite interesting. I can see how it is very useful for researchers to take these different aspects of newcomer adjustment and socialization outcomes and integrate them into a generalized model.

I am going to just pick out a couple things that I think would be a couple of the the bullet points for online community designers.

If you want to determine how well new users are being socialized, ask them:

- Do you understand what you want to do on the site (Measure Role Clarity)

- Do you think you have the capability to do it (Measure Self Efficacy)

- Do you feel that other users accept and interact with you (Measure Social Acceptance)

To help newcomers socialize:

- Encourage them to get feedback from other more experienced users, and ask what they could do to improve.

- Affirm their status as participating members.

- Help connect them with a mentor who can give them guidance on their adjustment.

--------------------------------------------------------------

oostendo@umich.edu

--------------------------------------------------------------

John Blair

I won't pretend that I understand the matrices provided in this reading, which is too bad as I'm sure they are informative.  Those aside, the text is very helpful in presenting so much work.

Some correlations to online communties can be made with this work.  If your goal is to embrace newcomers, ensure their experience is productive and value added to them, then the effort needed to guide them is going to be much more involved than if your simply seeking more new members.  If you want to improve the odds of new members becoming old members, then the upfront work is critical. 

To provide them role clarity - not only as a new member, but laying out what their options are going forward as they learn about the community is essential

Helping them achieve task mastery by providing tours or information that explains how the community operates, it's norms, policies, etc. will also be key.

Of course, social acceptance - making them feel at home,  is well documented throughout the various readings.

Treat newcomers as you would want to be treated in conjunction with the goals of the community in mind and the odds may fall in your favor of active, long term members.  Know your design for new members and adjust it align with the communities objectives, so those new members adjustment is quick, informative, and personal - assuming of course, you want members to contribute and be active, knowledgable participants within the community.

there were 3 inclusion criteria for choosing studies for this meta analysis research project:

The second one is the one that I disagree with. It states (pp.711): 

"we chose to focus on organizational socialization, not occupational socialization.  Organizational and occupational socialization are different types of adjustment.  for example, learning to be a nurse is different from learning to work at a new hospital as a nurse."

Obviously, there are differences in where you work and how you work but what isn't clear or i am uncovinced about is whether or not that difference is as pronounced as these authors would have us believe.

So, are there real differences in learning how to program using PERL vs. learning PERL via Nate's PERL Monks community?  I don't know that there is.   the culture of the site dictates how socialized or imbedded in that culture you will become but it doesn't limit how much you can/will learn.  In that process of being socialized a member may come out with a better sense of identity ( I AM A PERL MONK) or come out claiming I still know PERL but God those members of PERL MONKS are elitists/snobs.  

This is getting tougher to decipher and apply to my online alumni.

Based on the reading, new members joining the online alumni, assuming they want to assimilate well into the community, will want to know what is required to participate in the community - what needs to be done; and how best to behave that suits the community (a kind of appraisal).

On the other hand, from the community perspective, it needs to provide that conducive environment and supportive members. Based on Maanen and Jones, the socialization tactics of this online alumni are non-collective & non-formal (content), non-sequential and variable (context), and non-serial or random, and investiture (social). What this means is that new online alumni members is almost left to chance to be accepted into the community, because of the non-structured approach. Nonetheless, since the new members online are familiar with the old members offline 20 years back, such assimilation may not be that difficult.

Yet another exception to the theory.

This paper have given a good model to understand the newcomer adjustment process. The aim of this paper is to find variables that can forecast newcomer adjustments (role clarity, self-efficacy, social acceptance) and confirm newcomer adjustment (performance, job satisfaction, org, commitment, intentions to remain, turnover) and find the correlation between them based on data from other papers.

Community managers need to make changes to newcomer's information seeking behavior; to make the referent, relational and appraisal information easily accessible. Most online community provide the referent information via a search engine or navigation. Appraisal information is provided by means of leader boards, ranking, etc. Relational information can be presented using tools like voting, thank you points, comments, etc. These three class of information will reduce uncertainty of newcomers about their role in the community; by providing clarity and social acceptance amongst peers.

The second category of change is in the socialization process (or organizational socialization tactics) of newcomers. These are the six dimensions given by Van Maanen. The tactics can be grouped into content, context and social tactics. If these socializations tactics are implemented correctly, it will lead to clarity of role, self-efficacy and social acceptance amongst their peers. I think changes in socialization tactics have to be implemented using norms and incentives as opposed to just using tools to make these changes,

I don't know how to relate the job performance metrics: performance, job satisfaction, org, commitment, intentions to remain, turnover - with typical online communities that we are studying. Most of the outcome metrics are difficult to gather in online communities. It is not easy to determine if a user has left a community, let alone the reasons for their departure. Perhaps we can measure their performance (number of posts or other activity), commitment to community (duration of membership) and to some extent job satisfaction (well! users would have left if they weren't satisfied).

This paper is not as easy as the last one for me to follow yet the implication part seems clearer. The key finding of the paper is that newcomer adjustment mediates the information seeking-outcome and tactics-outcome relationships. In other words, it gives community designers some indication about where to focus and what they should do in order to achieve different outcomes. The only thing I was wondering is whether the six dimensions of tactics that were discussed in the first paper could be combined into this research and what the result might be then.

I've read and re-read this paper and still find myself floundering on what exactly the studied figured out.

One of my biggest questions is what exactly the authors discovered about the role of socialization tactics.  They break down socialization tactics between institutionalized and individualized. Does this mean that all of the correlations that they found between socialization tactics and adjustment/socialization are only for tactics that fall under the institutionalized category? Their discussion says there is reason to maintain this split between the institutionalized and individualized tactics, but I'm not sure what their exact evidence is.

Can anyone add some clarity to this?

Also, in Table 4 it looks like they categorize Fixed (as opposed to variable) socialization tactics as an institutional tactic. However, didn't the other paper say that fixed socialization actually encourages more innovative (thus, individual) responses because the person wasn't under so much uncertainty. This would make the categorization incorrect.

This is an interesting research which is integrating many other previous relevant studies. I had kind of known that especially in psychology, it's common to do meta-analysis on the provided statistical results from other papers. This particular one provides us a very typical example of its capability in both knowledge comparison and generalization as well as discussion and suggestions on methodologies.
The obvious reason for all these relevant literatures failed to comprise all the factors/variables is just because of the complexity embedded in the socialization process. Thus this is also the meaning for doing such a study to integrate all these efforts. However, another question might raise here, on the other hand, how much do these factors/variables count for the variance in the evaluators? In another word, how much we have not yet explained through these factors.
And, how much do the inherent correlations among these factors can affect the ability to explain a particular dimension of the measures? For example, it is very likely that Role Clarity, Self-efficacy, and Social-acceptance can be considerably correlated each other  If the inter-dependency is considerable, the meaning of each parameter estimates in the Figure 2 would becomes less.
I guess besides integrating previous contribution, it is more important to evaluate the whole body of them, in terms of how much they have counted for what our research question is asking for.

So here's what I think this reading is about. Basically, the study involved looking at a bunch of antecedent variables and measured their correlation to a number of possible outcomes in organizational socialization.

For example, the act of seeking role clarity might correlate highly with an organizational commitment.

What's sort of confusing is that a lot of these correlations seem fairly common sense. Sure, social acceptance leads to a lower turnover rate. Did it really take a lot of math for you to figure that out?

I guess the point is that with higher correlation values, we can pinpoint exactly which strategies to use in order to increase the likelihood of desired outcomes. And if there's an area that an organization is doing exceptionally poorly in, it can focus on the solution most likely to be successful. 

I've enjoyed the blog posts on potential applications for the findings of this study.

In keeping with that theme, I think the "potential implications"

section on pg.717 has a lot to offer.  In particular, this

quote stuck out to me:

"newcomers should consider seeking information regarding how well they are

doing in their jobs and what else they can do to increase their level of success."

 In terms of employment, this quote reminded me of a recent

salary negotiation workshop I attended wherein the speaker suggested

asking potential employers "If I'm completely successful in achieving your

ideal for this position, what will that look like in a year?"

This question gets at the tacit information that employers (or

in our case community managers) know about their expectations

for ideal applications of the role (community member / new employee)

One way I've seen this type of reasoning applied in an e-community

was the zaadz.com (now defunct) ambassador program. 

Site managers laid out a clear checklist of things that users

could do to achieve "ambassador" status, making their process

for selecting "ambassadors" entirely transparent and easy to

follow. 

 We might consider displaying clearly laid out expectations for

newcomer initiation in e-communities, particularly bond based

e-communities

Lisa McLaughlin

I found the figure 1 (p708) is helpful for me to have a bigger picture, and understand the relationships between concepts outlined in the reading. This reading also helps me to better understand Van Maanen’s reading. The main goal of tactics is to reduce the degree of uncertainty that newcomers may experience, so that newcomers have better adjustment.

One design claim I found from the reading is that in order to reduce uncertainty that newcomers face, it’s good to increase social interactions with supervisors and peers. It is especially true when information is provided by organizational insiders.

The data collection and "meta-analysis" (reviewing studies and coding them) for this aricle makes it a different sort of article than I've read before. In part, it feels like a review article, while the authors are also building an original model of the socialization process.

Perhaps the most surprising part of the model was that newcomer information seeking did not seem to be a predictor of self-efficacy.

This paper does leave me wondering if this model breaks in some different types, sizes, or styles of organizations. Some of the terminology seems very specific to firms, though the concepts seem to apply more broadly. Also, how does hold up if an individual moves to a different subunit in the hierarchy -- say, someone moves from one department to another? I would have been interested in a more comprehensive accounting of the different types of organizations covered in the studies they reviewed.

My intuition is that socialization into a firm (which perhaps would include some online groups like open source software teams) would be quite different, in some ways, than socialization into what I think of communities (this latter category would include students joining a college). I think the model would still be useful, but am don't have a good sense of what specifically would have to change.

This paper was helpful for thinking about some of the work I've been doing with Jude and Libby on the SI Wiki. I'm particularly interested in the role the wiki does play / could play / doesn't play in the socialization of new members of the SI organization (faculty, staff, phd students, masters students, etc?). I don't think we've looked at this enough yet for me to say anything interesting, but applying Bauer et al's model of newcomer adjustment to our interview questions (or keeping it in mind when coding transcripts) may help us better expose this role.

The article and our search also leads me to wonder what happens when information is pushed or otherwise made more freely available. How much of socialization is the acceptance of someone who signals they want to know things? If someone reads the information on a wiki or through a training syllabus rather than asking others or participating in a socializing exercise, will this change how others in the organization perceive them? (I ask this as someone who has once been advised that it would be good to communicate my interest by asking questions rather than just searching/reading on my own.)

I agree with others, that this reading was very dense, and I definitely skipped over the methods and results sections and went straight to the discussion to see what it all meant.

However, I don't see the results of this study being the important things for us to glean from it. What I took from this instead was a simple reaffirmation that newcomer adjustment is important. 

In online communities, it is important for a member to:

- be socially accepted by their peers

- to form relationships with others, which gives them a "sense of social capital that facilitates job performance" (I see this more on bond-based communities) 

- have clarity in their role on the communitiy. If the community has levels, they should easily know which level they are or which designations they have. 

- see their role as important to the community (esp. for identity-based) Otherwise, if they say "I don't see a place for me here", they're likely to leave.

- receive social support and appraisal of the job they're doing. I.e. feedback from more senior members, or recognition of work or participation they have done for the community. 

- Finally, newcomers need to have information available to answer their questions about the community and how to become a part of it. The article talked a lot about how newcomers use information-seeking behaviors to reduce their uncertainty about the environment. Therefore, I see one of the major lessons from this reading as "have information available about your community to allow newcomers to know how to get involved." Other readings have discussed how many newcomers lurk for a long time before getting involved, and use this time to acclimate themselves to the community and learn more about it. So, the more useful and informative descriptions and information you have available about your community, the better.

I'm still confused as to why role clarity is a means of "socializing newcomers" and isn't primarily "barrier to entry".  Making expectations, responsibilities, and priorities well-defined up front stops the wrong people from entering an organization and saves everyone wasted time, money, and effort expended via the acclimation process.  However, I'll concede that roles can be volatile as an organization navigates through unexpected (and expected) conditions.  Mergers, strategy changes, and failed initiatives cause roles to adapt to new organizational processes.  For example, if the Microhoo acquisition succeeds, Yahoo's programmers will have to learn and support Microsoft's languages (like C).

I think that self-efficacy and social acceptance are more closely related because positive performance often correlates with positive feedback.  Information acquisiton and task mastery reduces a newcomer's burden on ingrained members because he is less likely to fail and make a mess of things that will have to be resolved by someone with more expertise.  The need for and benefits of social acceptance seems pretty straightforward, but communication is a challenge.  Positive feedback, error correction, and mentoring appear to be the preferred methods in this meta-analysis.  However, while I understand a serial and fixed socialization process would help achieve acceptance, I'm confused about why investiture is a desired dimension.  I would think that a balance with divestiture would be preferred (though hard to manage) because whereas the former communicates "we like you as you are", the latter communicates "we want you to be one of us" and would affect a newcomer's desire to belong.