| Summary: | Within the last decade, more organizations are utilizing a non-traditional workforce. Specifically, these organizations are utilizing contract workers as resources to provide services and manufacture products. While this change in workforce provides benefits to organizations, the change also presents numerous challenges such as turnover. The turnover involved in such a relationship along with the addition of newcomers translates into an organizational socialization and knowledge transfer (KT) issue, because contract workers as well as employees need to be efficiently brought into a new organization, and knowledge needs to be shared with these new individuals so that they can effectively contribute to the work process. It is contended that organizations follow a typical, informal organizational socialization "policy" which involves KT in getting new contract workers and employees up to speed. This study addressed the typical organizational socialization policy as it is represented by formal knowledge transfer (FKT) via instructor-led/classroom training (ILT) and computer-based training (CBT) and by informal knowledge transfer (IKT) via a social network. The study focused on IKT, because companies understand this type of KT the least. In order to evaluate the organizational socialization of contract workers for this study, the contract worker population was compared to a baseline population of employees which was broken up into two employee groups: "rookies" and experienced hires. The formal and informal transfer of three types of knowledge (job task, role, and organizational norms) was assessed by using surveys and interviews (including social network methods) on a research population consisting of 166 employees (both rookies and experienced hires) and contract workers from a Fortune 100 company. The findings include: (a) Job task knowledge was transferred more often than role and organizational norms knowledge, (b) coworkers were used more than managers a source of knowledge overall, (c) worker classification as well as job task and role knowledge explained significant amounts of variance in performance, and (d) network size impacted performance.
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