The timing of adjustment strategies during work role transition: A longitudinal comparison between newcomers and job changers

New boundaryless careers imply recurrent employees’ work and organizational transitions and the need to rapidly adjust to new work roles. In Nicholson’s view (1984) this adjustment can happen through role innovation or personal change, but non-consistent results were found. Two recent criticism in Organizational Socialization were not considered in previous researches and results could be confused by them: the need to distinguish between type of transition; the timing of organizational socialization and when psychological phenomena happen. The aim of the research is to evaluate: a) changes of role innovation and personal strategies during six months after transition, and differences in two samples (evaluated by GLM); b) differences in the predicting role of job-discretion and novelty in the two samples, depending on the time considered (evaluated by moderator regression analysis). 43 newcomers and 42 job changers of a large firm filled out a structured questionnaire at 1,3, 6 months after role transition. Role innovation, personal change, job-discretion and job-novelty were measured at all times. Results show that adjustment strategies didn’t change over time, but the two samples consistently adopted different strategies: more role innovation for job changers (F(1,83)=12,80; p=.001) and more personal change for newcomers (F(1,83)=7,56; p=.007). Furthermore job changers adopted more personal change at t1 if job-novelty was high; newcomers showed more role innovation at t3 if they were high in job-discretion at t2. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.