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Assimilating new employees into an organization is an important task of human resource professionals (HRPs) and an essential element of their responsibilities as technical experts in their discipline (Huselid et al. , 2009, pp. 196-199). Ineffective onboarding destroys benefits achieved by hiring talented employees and increases the likelihood that the hard work spent in recruiting and selecting those employees will be wasted (Smart, 2012). Because many organizations view their onboarding process as an expense rather than an investment, they adopt a short-sighted approach to the process (Stanley, 2012). The predictable result from this false economy is that the transition into the organization for new employees is often painful - leading to underperformance and hindering an organization's ability to fully utilize the skills and abilities of these new employees (Caldwell and Caldwell, 2016).
The purposes of this paper are: to identify why improving this important human resource management (HRM) function greatly benefits those new employees and the organization itself; to clarify the ethical obligations implicit in new employee onboarding; and to provide top managers and HRPs with a model for improving the new employee onboarding process that meets the ethical expectations and psychological contracts of incoming employees. The paper begins with a brief explanation of the onboarding process and the nature of the psychological contract that exist between an organization and its employees. Building upon a model introduced by the University of Michigan Ethics Scholar, Larue Hosmer (1995), it then presents 12 ethical perspectives that identify how employees perceive the nature of their onboarding process. The paper then introduces a ten-step model for conducting a top-quality onboarding process, identifying how each of those steps honors the ethical expectations of the psychological contracts of new employees. The paper concludes with a summary of this paper and suggestions for additional research.
The onboarding process
Onboarding is the process of introducing a new employee into his or her new job; acquainting that employee with the organization's goals, values, rules and policies, and processes; and socializing the employee into an organizational culture (Watkins, 2016). Wanous and Reichers (2000) explained that the new employee orientation process occurs while employees are under a tremendous amount of stress. Organizations typically struggle with the onboarding process because their focus is on the organization and...