An Exploration of the Information Exchange Process: Information-Seeking and Information-Dissemination Behaviors During Organizational Socialization

Abstract

Adopting a qualitative approach to strategy identification, the results of this investigation revealed 17 information-seeking strategies and 34 information-dissemination strategies. With respect to the information-seeking strategies of newcomers, these findings suggest that newcomers may have a broader strategy repertoire than has been previously explored in the organizational socialization literature--with previous research advancing frameworks that incorporate two, three, five, and seven strategies. With respect to information-dissemination strategies, the findings of this study offer empirical support to the notion that newcomer learning is facilitated via a broad range of verbal and nonverbal information-dissemination cues. The 34 information-dissemination strategies revealed in this investigation, not previously discussed in the literature, suggest that with respect to communication activities, the socialization process is more complicated than has been previously explored by socialization's empirical literature. In total, the results of this investigation support and extend existing literature that explores the communication activities through which socialization is accomplished.