A Study Of Millennial Generation’s Socialization And Its Impacts On Psychological Capital And Work Engagement

As the millennial generation enters into different workplaces, high turnout and low commitment of the millennial generation employees have been paid attention. How to promote the millennial generation’s integration into organization became a hot topic for both academics and practitioners. The management of new staff is actually an organizational socialization process to make newcomers adapt to the new conditions quickly and blend in with the organization. Past research has shown that effective socialization, whose key influencing factors are psychological needs and proactive behavior, is crucial for staying competitive and improving performance. In current research on the millennial generation, the difference between the millennial generation and other generations was found with respect to ability, need and proactive behavior, which is caused by many factors such as history and culture. However, no research probes into how these traits exert their influence on socialization, or suggests how socialization for the millennial generation affects to their work engagement. This study applies the grounded theory method and empirical method to the two aspects and contributes to the research on the millennial generation and organizational socialization.Since there is no reliable measurement on millennial generation’s psychological needs and proactive behavior, the grounded theory method was chose to study its socialization process. Before beginning with a hypothesis, the authors collected internet comments on the millennial generation from Sina micro-blog. The key points were marked with a lists of codes extracted from the600effective comments collected. Then, the codes were grouped into similar concepts such that117workable concepts and14categories were formed from these concepts. Based on these concepts, the authors found that the millennial generation has unique psychological need and proactive behavior, built "need-cognition-action" model to explain how they impact organization socialization, and applied social learning theory and expectation theory to analyze the underlying mechanism. Results revealed that because of different circumstance, capacity and growing experience, the millennial generation has unique psychological needs, which further influence their organizational expectation; when the millennial generation compares expectation with organizational support, perceived match is formed. Good match is positively related to high degree of socialization, and proactive behavior positively moderates the relationship.The study on the millennial generation’s socialization has important significance in both theory and practice. In theory, firstly, these findings provide different and complementary contributions to former literature that the characteristics of the times, new staff’s capacity and personality influence formation of their psychological needs. Moreover, these findings enrich the current research on socialization by discovering that perceived match mediates the relation between organizational expectation and organizational socialization. In particular, results show that proactive behavior moderates the effects of perceived match on organizational socialization. In practice, the current results indicate that the millennial generation’s socialization outcomes, such as high performance and organizational commitment are associated with their unique psychological need and proactive behavior. On the one hand, manager should take appropriate socialization tactics according to the unique psychological needs. On the other hand, the millennial generation’s proactive behavior should be embedded into the organizational socialization tactics.To examine the relation among socialization, psychological capital and work engagement, participants in the study are234employees and their respective36leaders, working in big companies operating in mainland China. Organizations compete in several sectors (e.g., manufacture, finance, human resource, technique and logistics). Our empirical study indicates several results. Firstly, the findings suggest that socialization were important predictors of work engagement. Secondly, this research helps to understand the processes through which the relationship operates. We found that member psychological capital partially mediated the relation between socialization and work engagement. Finally, leader psychological capital positively moderated the effects of socialization on work engagement, and the effects of member psychological capital on their work engagment.Our finding that millennial generation’ socialization is positively related to their psychogical capital and work engagement is novel and conceptually appealing because it integrates the motivational aspect of socialization with the motivational propensity of psychological capital. These findings are promising, especially when considering that researchers of socialization have called for investigations into the ways in which work engagement can be fostered. In addition, we applied socialization on work engagement that is mediated by psychological capital. This study contributes to the better understanding of the theoretical foundation of psychological capital. Last, results from this study extend research on psychological capital by specifically providing boundary conditions in the leader positivity. Although recent work has stressed the importance of positivity of leadership in subordinate performance and attitude, the implication is that the impact of socializatoin on work engagement is higher under leader with higher level of psychological capital. Thus, the results of this study suggest a broader potential impact on leader lterature.Implications, limitations and future directions of this study are discussed.