Off to a hard start: How job rotation reshapes newcomers' learning and adjustment process

Although job rotation is a popular socialization practice for training newcomers, our understanding of its influence on newcomers' experience and outcomes remains limited. Extending the organizational socialization literature, we conceptualize job rotation as a planned, episodic event, which structures newcomers' learning and adjustment processes into three distinct, sequential phases: initial learning and adjustment (i.e., first episode), transition, and subsequent learning and adjustment (i.e., second episode). Using a field quasi-experiment with 12 waves of longitudinal data from 255 new nurses, we studied how job rotation reshaped the trajectories of newcomers' learning and adjustment on two indicators, namely, task mastery and social integration. Rotated newcomers' task mastery increased in the first episode, decreased immediately during the transition phase, and then increased again in the second episode. Notably, a cognitively challenging first episode (i.e., featuring job complexity) led to a greater increase in task mastery in the second episode. Contrary to expectations, rotated newcomers' social integration tended to decline in the first episode and continued declining in the second episode. Moreover, a socially challenging first episode (i.e., featuring social undermining) did not influence newcomers' social integration trajectory in the second episode. Our research extends the existing socialization literature and offers key practical implications for designing job rotation programs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).