ACUERDO DE MERO TRÁMITE

Organisational socialisation is the process by which employees are moulded into workers that have taken on expectations of behaviour that belong to a certain workplace. Individuals are socialised into a culture from early on in life, and this guides their outlook, and how they experience and respond to the world (Goslin 1969). A similar process is undertaken again, when an individual enters a new workplace and undergoes organisational socialisation (Kammeyer-Mueller and Wanberg 2003).

Organisational socialisation has received attention in academic literature from the 1960’s, with Schein (1968), Van Maanen (1978), Feldman (1981) and Fisher (1986)

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developing theories about the ways in which individuals adjust to their role in an organisation. Chao et al. 1994 undertook a review of organisational socialisation and sought to identify different domains of the job which require different processes of socialisation. They have explained that socialisation applies unevenly to different domains of the job, and that individuals that are well socialised in one domain may not be as well socialised in another. The employees’ levels of socialisation in different domains will have varying impacts on different areas of their working life. The six domains identified by Chao et al. are: performance proficiency; people; politics; language; organizational goals and values; and history (1994, pp. 731 – 732). Chao

et al. (1994) undertook a longitudinal study to explore the effect of these different

domains of socialisation on career effectiveness and found significant results, primarily that those employees who were better socialised across all domains also had better prospects for career effectiveness.

Feldman (1981) identified three distinct stages in which organisational socialisation occurs. The first is “anticipatory socialization” which refers to the learning done before joining the organisation; the second is “encounter” in which a new employee joins the organisation and may experience some shifts in values, skills and attitudes; and the third is “change and acquisition” in which the employee has learned all the skills for their role and settled into the norms and values of their group (Feldman 1981, pg. 310). The first phase can refer to the training or education that an employee undergoes before being employed by the organisation and this is when the first adjustments to identity can be seen. Hughes (1956 in Pratt, Rockmann and Kaufmann 2006) said that medical students “may be expected to get not merely a better notion of the skills required, of the tasks to be performed, of the roles to be played . . . but also to adjust his conception of his own mental, physical, and personal aptitudes, his tastes and distastes” (1956: 24 in Pratt, Rockmann and Kaufmann 2006, pg. 237). This suggests the idea that professionals, at least, begin to change and develop their professional identity in the very first stage of socialisation.

Wenger (2000) has explained an idea similar to Feldman’s second stage of socialisation – “encounter”. He has written that when an individual enters a workplace, they enter into a community of practice and an existing social learning system, which they become a part of. This is the method by which they absorb practical knowledge about their role as well as knowledge about the social values and conduct associated with the role and the work culture. This is reiterated by Van Maanen (1978), who expounded that, “any person crossing organizational

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boundaries is looking for clues on how to proceed. Thus colleagues, superiors, subordinates, clients, and other work associates can and most often do support, guide, hinder, confuse, or push the individual who is learning a new role” (pg. 20). Therefore, the secondary or informal socialisation process bequeaths the expectation of modes of behaviour to new employees. In this way, they learn not only how they are expected to behave, but also how they can expect to be treated in the workplace. This is extremely important to their perceptions of what constitutes ill-treatment in the workplace, and can also have a knock-on effect on how they feel they are supposed to react to ill-treatment, as seen in Section 4 of this chapter.

Wenger (2000) has said that organisations not only have their own social learning system, but exist within a wider social learning system which incorporates their industry. Therefore, employees just starting their careers will also be socialised into the wider norms and practices of the industry when they begin their first job. Van Maanen and Schein (1979) discussed the different socialisation strategies that organisations can employ to mould the identity of their employees, asserting that undesirable characteristics could be stripped away from a new recruit during their initial year in their work environment. This could be achieved through a divestiture socialisation process in which the newcomers undergo harassment from experienced members and are made to do low-level work for a time until they embrace the desired values (pp. 64-65). They also explain that the extent to which this process is uncomfortable for the employee depends on how different their values were to begin with.

In more recent writing, Webb (2006) has identified three ways in which organisations attempt to exert control by regulating the identity of their employees, of which the first two are relevant to this study. The third is emotional labour which applies to work which is customer-facing and is not relevant to the seafarers in this study. The first way is by constructing a ‘we’ and engaging the employee in the corporate culture. Resonating with Guest’s (1987) comments on the use of organisational culture to draw employees into committing to the company, this method articulates a ‘corporate culture’ that employees can buy into and increase their commitment to their work. In this method, they encourage people to achieve an identity for which the values and direction have been established by the company.

The second way is by “using teamwork to create self-managed identification with organisational goals” (Webb 2006, pg. 157). For this, the company creates media

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induction programmes and social activities that embody corporate values and encourages employees to take part. However, Webb emphasises that it is teamwork which really facilitates the inculcation of a set of shared values into employees through utilising the team dynamics such as peer pressure and self-surveillance (McKinley and Taylor 1998 in Webb 2006, pg. 157).

The reason why employees would fall for these strategies and buy into the corporate identity is because “…people struggle to achieve, but continue to need, a secure sense of self. Insecurity is exacerbated by the organisational demands of continuous adaptability to new problems, changing project teams and responsibilities” (Webb 2006, pg. 161). In effect, this makes them more susceptible to adopting the professional identity offered to them at work.

At this point, it is pertinent to consider Fournier’s idea that the conferring of ‘professional competence’ upon the employees allows management to govern the actions of those employees from a distance, maintaining the illusion of autonomy but severely limiting it at the same time (1999, pg. 282).

Indeed, this subtle form of control was noted by D’Cruz and Noronha (2006) in their research in call centres in India. They noted that the notion of professionalism was conveyed to new employees at every step of their induction into their workplace, and continuously through their training as well. This resulted in “an internalization of the notion such that agents’ senses of self change to embrace the direct and indirect behavioural and cognitive correlates of employer-defined professionalism” (pg. 346). Once the idea had been adopted by the call centre agent, it drove them to regulate their own behaviour at all times and strive to excel in order to maintain a ‘professional’ standard at all times. The truly curious nature of this act by management is that, not so long ago, a call centre agent would not have been considered a professional. Fournier finds this “casual generalisation of the notion of professionalism” (1999, pg. 281) to be a true sign of management’s intentions, but concedes that the process could also be a means to market themselves in a more appealing light to consumers, or in this case, their clients. However, management’s exertion of control over employees through the identity regulation process has also been documented by Alvesson and Willmott (2002) and management’s moulding of employees to better serve the employer’s interest, has been suggested by Hatch and Cunliffe (2006).

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As organisational socialisation impacts the formation of professional identity and these contribute to the organisational culture, it raises the question of the link between organisational socialisation in the different domains identified by Chao et al. (1994) and the effect of these on the work environment in such a way as to generate conditions for ill-treatment. Seafarers are professionals who carry out their duties at a distance from management, and the question of whether this professionalism is used against them can elicit an insight into the causes of ill-treatment onboard ships.