Connecting with new business students: the role of socialization and core self-evaluations in university identification

ABSTRACT

Organizational identification has gained popularity in the organizational sciences and has important implications for the experiences of new undergraduate business students. Researchers have focused largely on how characteristics of organizations influence organizational identification, but limited work has explored how characteristics of the environment and the individual work together. In the present study, relationships between the dimensions of organizational socialization of undergraduate business students and university identification are investigated. Further, students’ core self-evaluations are explored as a moderator of the relationship between socialization dimensions and organizational identification. The data for the study was collected from 209 entering-college first-year undergraduates in an introductory business course in the United States. We found that two socialization dimensions, people and organizational goals and values, are positively related to university identification. Furthermore, core self-evaluations interact with the history dimension to influence university identification, such that history socialization has a positive effect on university identification for students with high core self-evaluations but not for those with low core self-evaluations. Discussion, implications, and future research areas are included.

KEYWORDS:

• Core self-evaluations
• organizational identification
• organizational socialization
• business course
• management education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).