Moving Forward: Next Steps for Advancing the Research and Practice of Employee Socialization

This chapter briefly describes the advances in the area of organizational socialization and highlights a number of important future research directions outlined by the preceding chapters within this handbook. Next directions for research include new antecedents and outcomes of newcomer socialization, how to explore socialization process and dynamics in conjunction with time issues, and how to expand the lessons from newcomer socialization to individuals experiencing different types of newness, such as expatriates. In addition, the authors provide four suggestions for socialization researchers: tie research to socialization, draw upon nonsocialization areas of research, connect different areas of socialization research, and be ambitious. Implications for socialization practitioners and organizations are discussed.