Whether Newcomers' Personality Changes In Their Early Career

In practice,managers make personnel arrangements according to employees' personalities,such as personnel recruitment(Guion & Gottier,1965),position allocation(O 'reilly III,& Roberts,1975),position promotion(Barton,& Cattell,1972),and so on.In theory,management studies also use personality as a predictor to carry out relevant research,such as individual job performance(Barrick,and Mount,1991;Hurtz,and Donovan,2000;Zhao,seibert,2006),work attitude and behavior,etc.But these studies see personality as stable.Although sporadic studies have explored the causes of personality change,these studies do not explain the process of personality change and the factors explored are exclusive.Based on regulatory focus theory,the present research investigates whether the personality changes in the workplace,especially in the early career of newcomers.We expect that career shocks as the major experiences in the workplace will stimulate the individual's regulatory focus: positive career shocks will stimulate the promotion focus and negative career shocks will stimulate the prevention focus.Different goal orientation and organizational socialization bring different strength to the stimulate regulatory focus,which directly affects the behavior taken by employees,that is,personality changes.We collected data with a sample of new employees during their first seven months after entry,and examined their personality change patterns and the influence of individual and organizational factors on the different change patterns of newcomers' personality using growth mixture model.The results show that mixed growth patterns exist in personality of newcomers.Extroversion has the united change pattern-negative change pattern,while neuroticism has the positive change pattern and maintaining pattern.The interaction between positive career shock and learning goal orientation remarkably causes the negative growth of the extroversion.The interaction between negative career shock and avoidance goal orientation remarkably causes the positive growth of the neuroticism.Organizational socialization tactics is also found to weaken the impact of the interaction between negative career shock and avoidance goal orientation on neuroticism change pattern.The results show that individuals with learning goal orientation are better able to reduce the impact of career shocks because learning goal orientation inspires individuals to pay more attention to new knowledge and skills rather than the final results.Furthermore,socialization strategies are a buffer that organizations can provide,and organizations can help employees with their development.The research of this paper enriches the literature of socialization and the regulatory focus.We have theoretically explored the specific stimulation of regulatory focus: career shocks.