An Empirical Study on Organizational Socialization and Its Relationship with Employees’ Age and the Knowledge Management

Abstract

The main concerns of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes include creating, managing, retaining and transferring knowledge within organization. Firms are often organized on global basis and more often involved in joint ventures, increased frequency of acquisitions, mergers and strategic alliances. The demographics continue to change within industrial organizations and knowledge-based enterprises. There is a relation between age of employees and knowledge transfer, retaining and creation. Knowledge creation is a complex and dynamic process within organization and depends on different factors including organizational socialization. The purpose of this study was to determine if the age of the employees has any significant impact on knowledge management and creation due to organizational socialization. We hypothesized that there is a correlation between age of employees and knowledge creation due to organizational socialization and conduct an empirical research to prove its validity. The 350 respondents were included in questioner-based research from public sector organizations. One-way ANOVA was used in order to check the impact of Demographic variables on dependent variable by testing the significance of control variables over dependent variables of this research. Results (Mean: 3.6366, Std. Deviation:.45813 and Cronbach’s alpha: 0.742) suggests that age moderates the relation between organizational socialization and knowledge creation in such a way that the relationship is weaker for older workers compared to younger ones.