The effect of training on the relationship between organizational socialization and organizational citizenship behavior

The main purpose of this study is to reveal the effect of training on the relationship between organizational socialization and organizational citizenship behavior. Another purpose of this study is to reveal the effect of training on organizational socialization and organizational citizenship behavior respectively. The population of the study includes the sergeant candidates attending the Police Chiefs Training Center under the Turkish Police Academy. Full count sampling is conducted in the study. For the purposes of this study, data were collected from 1660 sergeant candidates at the beginning of theoretical training, at the end of theoretical training and at the end of practical training. The research design, conducted within the framework of quantitative paradigm, was set as a single group pretest-posttest model. In this research, the organizational socialization scale, developed by Chao et al. (1994), was used to measure the participants' organizational socialization levels and the organizational citizenship behavior scale, developed by Podsakoff et al. (1990) was used to measure the participants' organizational citizenship behavior levels. While the calculated correlation level of the participants' organizational socialization and organizational citizenship behavior levels before the training was found to be .345 (low), the calculated correlation level of the participants' organizational socialization and organizational citizenship behavior levels following the end of the theoretical training was found to be .521 (moderate) and the calculated correlation level of the participants' post-test organizational socialization and organizational citizenship behavior levels was found to be .555 (moderate). For this reason, it is concluded that both theoretic and practical training has mediating effect on the relationship between organizational socialization and organizational citizenship behavior. Meanwhile, as a result of the analysis, it is also concluded that the practical training has a positive effect on both organizational socialization and organizational citizenship behavior respectively and that there is no impact on organizational citizenship behavior although the theoretical training has a positive effect on organizational socialization.