From refugee to manager? Organisational socialisation practices, refugees' experiences and polyrhythmic socialisation

• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Author: Renate Ortlieb,Elena Ressi
• Date: 01 July 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12500

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

From refugee to manager? Organisational socialisation practices,

refugees’experiences and polyrhythmic socialisation

Renate Ortlieb | Elena Ressi

Institute of Human Resource Management,

University of Graz, Graz, Austria

Correspondence

Renate Ortlieb, Institute of Human Resource

Management, University of Graz,

Elisabethstrasse 50, 8010 Graz, Austria.

Email: renate.ortlieb@uni-graz.at

Abstract

Labour market integration of refugees is a challenge to which employers can

make a major contribution. This study examines how organisational socialisation

practices tailored to the needs of refugees shape the refugees’socialisation and

development. We draw on a longitudinal case study focused on refugees doing

apprenticeships in a supermarket chain in Austria. We show how a set of

organisational practices benefit the refugees. However, these practices, along with

other factors inside and outside the workplace, also complicate the refugees’

progress because they create tensions related to time. We identify three temporal

tensions and propose the concept of ‘polyrhythmic socialisation’to theorise about

the specific shape of these tensions, their causes and consequences. We formulate

recommendations for practitioners and avenues for future research.

KEYWORDS

apprenticeships, case study, organizational socialization, Refugees, time tensions

In the beginning, it was too difficult for me. I

couldn’t speak German very well and there were

so many products [groans]. There aren’t that

many products in Afghanistan. Everything was

new. All the new words. I really had to learn so

much. The first three months were crazy, after

that it was good. Then I got to know my col-

leagues and they were good and nice. Everyone

taught me something. Then things became eas-

ier.Amar, a young refugee from Afghanistan,

about his apprenticeship in Austria

INTRODUCTION

The high numbers of refugees arriving in Europe in the

last decades have sparked research interest about their

integration into the host countries’labour markets. By

illuminating what happens after refugees start working

and prepare for career development in the new organisa-

tion, this article extends the scope of research in this

field beyond its primary concentration on how refugees

find employment (e.g., Cheung & Phillimore, 2014;

Eggenhofer-Rehart et al., 2018; Gericke et al., 2018).

All new employees face countless corporate rules, so

organisations use various measures such as welcome

events, seminars or handbooks to provide the newcomers

with orientation. A well-designed onboarding and

socialisation process is important for long-term outcomes

such as job satisfaction, performance, and career develop-

ment (Batisticˇ,2018; Bauer et al., 2007;Weller

et al., 2019). For refugees, the new workplace environment

may be particularly overwhelming, as the opening quota-

tion from Amar illustrates. This is because refugees typi-

cally do not have time to prepare for living and working

in the new country. They encounter different languages,

cultures and state institutions, and many have no connec-

tions to locals who could share knowledge about work-

place customs in the organisation or in the host country

more generally (Abkhezr et al., 2015; Baranik et al., 2018;

Baran et al., 2018;Colic-Peisker&Tilbury,2006;

Jackson & Bauder, 2014;Knappertetal.,2018).

Thus, the question arises, how can employers address

the special needs of refugee newcomers in order to pro-

vide them with orientation during organisational

socialisation and prepare them for further career develop-

ment? Knowledge about the organisational socialisation

of refugees is crucial to better understand their

DOI: 10.1111/emre.12500

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any

medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

© 2022 The Authors. European Management Review published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Academy of Management (EURAM).

European Management Review. 2022;19:185–206. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/emre 185

integration into the labour market. For the integration

to be sustainable, refugees must not only be introduced

well to the initial job but also receive opportunities

for career development (Yakushko et al., 2008;

Zacher, 2019). Yet, there is scant knowledge about ref-

ugees’socialisation and career development in organi-

sations to date.

This study explores the organisational socialisation

process of refugees. It focuses on organisational

socialisation practices and the experiences of refugees,

their managers and co-workers. By the term ‘practice’we

refer to any kind of organizational members’activities,

and we are interested in both the formal measures

designed by human resource (HR) managers to facilitate

the refugee newcomers’socialisation and informal

activities of any organisational member influencing

socialisation. We conducted a qualitative longitudinal

case study in a supermarket chain in Austria, focusing on

six young refugees who served apprenticeships as retail

management assistants. Over a period of roughly a year,

we conducted 42 interviews with the refugees, their man-

agers and co-workers. We found that various

socialisation practices enabled the refugees to internalise

the corporate culture and acquire relevant knowledge,

skills and abilities. However, these practices also created

tensions in the socialisation process, which complicated

the refugees’progress. Specifically, we found that man-

agers and refugees had different expectations and

experiences concerning the refugees’development. Refu-

gees also experienced inconsistencies over time in the

application of organisational rules. Furthermore, issues

outside the company thwarted the refugees’expected

trajectories because the external factors shifted the priori-

ties of both managers and refugees. We developed the

concept of ‘polyrhythmic socialisation’to theorise about

the refugees’socialisation processes and the inherent

tensions.

Our study responds to prior calls for longitudinal

designs to study refugees’career development

(Zacher, 2019) and calls for more research on refugee

integration at the organisational level (Lee et al., 2020).

We contribute to scholarship on the labour market

integration of refugees by providing in-depth empirical

insight into the experiences of refugee newcomers, their

managers and co-workers. In particular, we highlight

the problematic consequences of specific organisational

socialisation practices and events in the refugees’

formative phase as new employees. Our notion of

polyrhythmic socialisation offers a more nuanced

theoretical understanding of the refugees’socialisation

processes.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Following Van Maanen & Schein’s(1979) milestone text,

a large body of research on organisational socialisation

has emerged in the last decades (Batisticˇ&Kaše, 2015).

In line with this literature, we define organisational

socialisation as ‘the process by which an individual

acquires the social knowledge and skills necessary to

assume an organizational role’(Van Maanen &

Schein, 1979, p. 211). This process includes the inter-

nalisation of corporate norms and values as well as the

acquisition of job-specific knowledge, skills and abilities

(Feldman, 1981).

Previous research found that varying organisational

socialisation tactics, understood as the ‘ways in which the

experiences of an individual in transition […] are

structured for [her/him] by others in the organisation’

(Van Maanen & Schein, 1979, p. 230), produce specific

long-term outcomes, such as individuals’role clarity, role

orientation, task mastery, job satisfaction, organisational

commitment and intention to quit (Ashforth et al., 2007;

Bauer et al., 2007; Jones, 1986; Saks et al., 2007; Van

Maanen & Schein, 1979). Research has also highlighted

the important function of co-workers and managers as

socialisation agents (e.g., Cooper et al., 2021;

Kammeyer-Mueller et al., 2013) and the pro-active

behaviour of the newcomers themselves (Bauer

et al., 2007; Saks et al., 2007).

A common theme in the literature that is particularly

relevant for our study addresses the experiences and

activities of newcomers in their initial weeks, which have

particularly formative effects (Ashforth, 2012). For

instance, supportive or undermining behaviour by super-

visors and co-workers in the first few weeks affect the

newcomers’organisational commitment and withdrawal

behaviour 3 months later to a larger extent than support-

ive or undermining behaviour in the following weeks

(Kammeyer-Mueller et al., 2013). Likewise, newcomers

whose expectations are surpassed by the organisation in

their first weeks adjust more easily to their new environ-

ment than newcomers whose expectations are not met or

are met only to the expected degree (Woodrow &

Guest, 2020). Thus, newcomers’initial experiences have

long-lasting consequences for their career development

(Mayrhofer & Gunz, 2020).

Another particularly relevant topic is the role of the

newcomers’social identity. Scholarship on organisational

socialisation has widely neglected newcomers’socio-

demographic characteristics (Cooper-Thomas &

Anderson, 2006). Van Maanen & Schein (1979) intro-

duced the notion of individualised tactics that ‘give each

newcomer a unique set of learning experiences that

allows heterogeneity in their responses’(Jones, 1986,

p. 264). However, this does not mean that socialisation

agents actually do automatically consider the individual

characteristics of newcomers. Van Maanen &

Schein (1979) also pointed out that organisations may

adopt specific socialisation measures for minorities,

using the examples of ‘a black firefighter entering a previ-

ously all white engine company or a woman entering

managerial ranks in the firm that had previously been

186 ORTLIEB AND RESSI