Improving employees’ proactive behaviors at workplace: The role of organizational socialization tactics and work engagement

ABSTRACT

This study examines the relationship between organizational socialization tactics (context, content, and social tactics), employees’ work engagement and their proactive behaviors (relationship building, positive framing and self-management). Based on a sample of 675 Vietnamese young graduated employees with highly academic background, under 35 years old and with less than 5-year working experience at their organization, the results of questionnaire survey showed that institutionalized socialization tactics can increase Vietnamese employees’ proactive behaviors and their engagement to work, and in its turn, work engagement encourages proactive behaviors at workplace. Among three types of socialization tactics, social tactics were the strongest predictor on all proactive behaviors. Our results also documented a partially mediating role of work engagement in the relationship between social tactics and proactive behavior, and fully mediating role in the relationship between context, content tactics, and proactive behavior. Our results hence support the interactionist perspective in that what happens in work settings is not a result of sole organization’s practice nor individual effort; rather, it is the outcome of the interaction between the organization and the individual.

KEYWORDS:

• Organizational socialization tactics
• proactive behaviors
• work engagement
• young employees

Declaration of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Abbreviations

EFA: Exploratory Factors Analysis; KMO: Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin test’s value; OST: Organizational Socialization Tactics; OLS: Ordinary least squares

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Vietnam National University [QG 16.42].