While companies continue to diversify their workforce and create inclusive experiences for their employees, research related to how organizations can promote inclusion for new employees in the socialization and onboarding context remains unexamined. The current dissertation aimed to 1) further extant socialization by redefining investiture and divestiture as separate tactics that address newcomers’ negotiation of their personal and organizational identity and 2) examine the effects of both investiture and divestiture on proximal (i.e., inclusion) and distal (i.e., job satisfaction and job embeddedness) outcomes. I anticipated that investiture and divestiture are not bipolar tactics and that newcomers who experience socialization comprised of both investiture and divestiture would experience the most positive impacts. Results from Study 1 support the notion that divestiture does not exist only in the absence of investiture, but both are instead separate-but-related socialization tactics. Results from Study 2, however, suggest that affirming newcomers’ unique identity (i.e., investiture) has the most positive impacts on newcomers. Specifically, the results revealed that only investiture increased newcomers’ perceptions of inclusion and this, in turn, predicted greater job satisfaction and job embeddedness. Implications, limitations, and future directions are discussed.
Read
