Matched Data from Hires and Managers Examined

What are the experiences of new hires and their hiring managers? How do those experiences impact outcomes such as performance and turnover?

Responses from about 900 people were collected through surveys at a large health care organization and are being examined for performance and turnover patterns through a Future of Work project that began last fall.

That information has the potential to yield published papers in academic journals about employee socialization and how managers treat internal hires versus external hires, according to Associate Professor JR Keller, who is leading the project in collaboration with Associate Professor Rebecca Kehoe. 

A three-wave survey of every new managerial hire, both internal and external, and their hiring manager spanned an 18-month period. 

New hires were asked how they found the job, what proactive behaviors they engaged in during the first few months and how they were settling into their new roles. 

Hiring managers were asked to describe the role they filled and why they chose a candidate, actions taken to socialize the new hire and how the new hire was performing. 

Detailed personnel records for the new hires, their teams and hiring managers were also collected and linked to the survey results.

The information could break new ground, Keller said. “I am unaware of any previous work which has captured matched survey data from the new hire and their hiring managers, let alone been able to link this data to personnel records to examine substantive outcomes such as performance and turnover.”

“I believe that this data has the potential to lead to publishable research on employee socialization and how managers select and treat internal versus external hires,” said Keller, associate director of Research & Corporate Outreach, ILR Workplace Inclusion and Diversity Education, known as WIDE.

First-year doctoral student Joanne Cao received a fellowship to examine the data. The experience, Keller said, will accelerate her learning curve and “familiarize her with the pros and cons of working with data from a single large organization, which should help her decide what direction she’d like to take with her own research.”