Session Information
32 SES 10, Developing Higher Education Organizations - Research in and for Universities
Paper Session
Contribution
The University of Southern Denmark (SDU) has initiated a project designing university employee induction practices and guidelines for onboarding newly hired staff members. Representatives from the technical and administrative staff functions across different campuses constitute a task force commissioned to outline the new onboarding principles during 2016. An at-home researcher specialized in organizational socialization, newcomer innovation and employee induction (Revsbæk 2014) collaborates closely with the task force in an action research endeavor to develop the organizational practices of employee induction, newcomer innovation and the (/lack of) negotiation of change during organizational entries. Research on organizational socialization and employee induction tends to focus exclusively on the learning needs of the newcomer, neglecting the experience (of uncertainty) among organizational veterans related to organizational entries (Gallagher & Sias 2009). Making organizational socialization only a matter of newcomer learning, rather than focusing on the newcomer-veteran interdependencies and the negotiation of organizational change and continuity during periods of entry (Feldman 2012; Levine, Moreland & Choi 2001) is out of tune with the increased job mobility in today’s labor market and has resulted in induction best practices organized as education-like spaces and student-teacher exchanges (Daskalaki 2012). Drawing on practices of co-design (ethnographic user studies and participatory workshops), and insights from research on participatory innovation (Buur & Larsen 2010), an inquiry-based design process engages the task force technical and administrative staff representatives as at-home ethnographic inquirers (Alvesson 2009) collecting stories from newcomer and veteran colleagues of their experience from organizational entry encounters and collaborations. Drawing on the traditions of insider action research (Coghlan & Brannick 2014) and practices of auto-ethnographic reflexive narrative inquiry (Stacey 2012) the task force experience and data is explored in co-design workshops alongside researcher-conducted interviews of newcomer staff members and their hiring manager and close colleagues. The paper reports on the staff voice in relation to university induction practices and reflects on the dilemmas of institutional commitment versus local community commitment of staff personnel. The significance of the academic figurations of power between faculty and staff groups is explored in relation to staff member induction.
References
Alvesson, M. (2009). At-home ethnography: Struggling with closeness and closure. In Ybema, S. et. al. (eds.) Organizational Ethnography. UK, London: Sage. Buur, J., & Larsen, H. (2010). The quality of conversations in participatory innovation, CoDesign, Vol. 6(3), 121–138. Coghlan, D. & Brannick, T. (2014). Doing action research in your own organization, 4th Ed. UK, London: Sage. Daskalaki, M. (2012) Recontextualizing new employee induction: Organizational entry as a change space. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 48(1), 93-114. doi: 10.1177/0021886310395899 Feldman, D.C. (2012). The impact of socializing newcomers on insiders. In C.R. Wanberg (Ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Socialization (pp. 215-229). New York: Oxford University Press. Gallagher, E. B. & Sias, P. M. (2009): The new employee as a source of uncertainty: Veteran employee information seeking about new hires, Western Journal of Communication, 73(1), 23-46. Levine, J.M. et al (2001). Group socialization and newcomer innovation. In M.A. Hogg & R.S. Tindale (Eds), Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology (pp. 86-106). Malden: Blackwell Publishers. Revsbæk, L. (2014). Adjusting to the Emergent. A process theory perspective on organizational socialization and newcomer innovation. Aalborg University Press. Stacey, R. (2012). Tools and techniques of leadership and management: Meeting the challenge of complexity. Oxon, UK: Routledge.
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