Impact of a Consulting Process on CEO's Organizational Socialization

To date there is still a need of knowledge and literature on CEO's socialization process. Indeed more research works focus on socialization, as well as the employee integration phase in the company (Perot, Lacaze...) or the corporate buyer (Deschamps, Siegel, Boussaguet...). Similarly, the consultants are very active in accompanying buyers or entrepreneurs, but few on the CEOs incoming. Thus, we find a lot of work on organizational socialization, but few are focused on CEOs, although their role, function and integration are complex and specific. This paper is aimed at analyzing the organizational socialization process of CEO and to propose a model of organizational socialization of the leader (OSL). Our aim is thus to help consultants better anticipate and support the new CEO through better understanding this phenomenon because, as pointed out by Prax (2005) "one can't replace someone overnight". An overview of extant literature allows a better understanding of the socialization concept and the organizational socialization theory and in particular the resulting concept of organizational socialization of the employee (OSE) (Section 1). A second review highlights various definitions and typologies connected with the leader's position (Section 2). Our proposed model of organizational socialization and engineering of the leader strategic integration (OSL) as well as the methodology used to test the variables of this model will be presented in section 3.