How new employees get onboarded and established inside organizations is critical to their subsequent careers and organizational success. These initial adjustments are typically guided by a formal manager and team members within a clearly defined and stable team boundary. However, in project-based organizations, employees work with many managers and move around to different project teams. Therefore, their team membership is constantly in flux and they must take on many of the tasks of deciding which projects to work on and at what pace themselves in many of these settings. When new employees lack a formal structure and manager to guide them, how do they get onboarded and establish their careers successfully? Will it be equally challenging for all or more so for some than others? Drawing on an 18-month case study of junior attorneys at a top 50 US Big Law firm, I articulate how a fluid organizational structure creates a dilemma for junior attorneys when dealing with work requests from many partners. I also identify three approaches juniors take in response to this dilemma, which varies according to their conceptions of work requests and concomitant networking patterns with partners: Ally-Building, All-Encompassing, and Drifting. Interestingly, these approaches are closely related to their social background. My findings suggest that Ally-Building is the most effective, yet juniors from the first-generation college graduate background are predominantly All-Encompassing or Drifting due to their greater feelings of insecurity and difficulties in sourcing work. This study draws attention to the new challenges employees face in establishing themselves in the fluid work environment and the variations in their degree of success in addressing these challenges according to their social background.

Keywords: Project-Based Organizations; Early Careers; Workplace Inequality; Managing Work Requests; First-gens; Networking; Overwork