The Open University ’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs Mapping organizational members ’ sense of fit

Despite its importance in the organizational behavior literature, person– organization (P–O) fit remains an elusive construct. One reason for this is the lack of research about organizational members’ own sense of their P–O fit. In this paper we report an empirical study that explored organizational members’ own sense of fit using storytelling and causal mapping techniques. The results suggest that organizational members categorize their perceptions of their fit into five discrete domains (job, people, employment, values, and extrawork) comprising thirteen subdomains: nature of work, profession or vocation, skills and knowledge, emotions, relationships with colleagues, relationship with line manager, physical environment, conditions of employment, opportunities for growth and development, organizational values, mission, family and personal life. Reviews of respondents’ causal maps and interview transcripts gave some insight into the consequences of organizational members’ perceptions of fit and provided further insights into the nature of fit. These insights included the fragility of fit, how the degree of seniority changed the emphasis in organizational members’ fit, and the role and nature of trigger events that change people’s sense of fit from good fit to misfit. A considerable amount of research and theory has examined the determinants of people’s behaviour (e.g. Bowers, 1973; Chatman, 1989, 1991; Mischel 1968; Pervin, 1978). After years of debate there is general agreement that individual characteristics, aspects of the situation, and, crucially, the interaction of person and situational variables combine to explain behaviour (Krahé, 1992). In the domain of work, the power of interactions to shape behaviour has been shown in many ways. Holland’s work, for example, has demonstrated that people choose vocations based on the fit of their personality to their perceptions of the profession (Holland, 1985). Chatman’s work demonstrated that new recruits become socialized to their new employer based on the congruence of individual and organizational values. And Caldwell and O’Reilly (1990) have shown that job performance and satisfaction are strongly related to the congruence 1 All correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jon Billsberry, Centre for Human Resource and Change Management, Open University Business School, The Open University, Milton Keynes MK8 0DA, United Kingdom; +44 (0) 1908 655888; Fax +44 (0) 1908 655898; electronic mail may be sent to [email protected]. 2 The authors would like to thank Véronique Ambrosini for her help and advice in the development of this paper. Billsberry et al Mapping Fit 2 of people to the required job competencies. In her integrative review of the person–organization fit literature, Kristof (1996) identified several different forms of interaction between people and their work environments. In addition to the focus of her study on person–organization fit, she noted the research that has explored person–vocation (P–V) fit, person–group (P–G) fit, and person–job (P–J) fit. These four different types of person–work environment fit have been supplemented more recently by Van Vianen’s (2000) exploration of person–people (P–P) fit. In all of these domains, researchers have found person–environment interactions influencing some form of behaviour at work. However, what we do not know is how all these ‘fits’ fit together (Judge & Ferris, 1992; Kristof, 1996; Kristof-Brown, 1997, 2000). Given the interdependency of the various aspects of the work environment – e.g. the design of jobs is a reflection of organisational culture – several important questions are raised: Are these different types of fit aspects of the same overall sense of fit? Or, are they separate forms of fit that are independent of each other? Moreover, regardless of whether or not these forms of fit are separate or not, we do not know whether our list of ‘fits’ is complete. This situation has arisen because of the way researchers have explored the domain. So far, researchers have considered fit from three angles. First, fears of anthropomorphism led some researchers to conceptualize fit between people and organizations according to the language and currency of organizations. For example, the most commonly used tool to capture P–O fit, the Organizational Culture Profile (O’Reilly, Chatman & Caldwell, 1991), was developed following a review of the organizational culture literature. Those values that also had relevance to individuals were retained to form the instrument. Second, some researchers have explored a narrow segment of fit in accordance with their interests. Turban and Keon (1993), for example, were interested in the congruence between individual’s motivational preferences and organizational structures. The third way that researchers have approached the study of fit was to explore homogeneity between individuals using extant individual-level constructs. Schneider, Smith, Taylor and Fleenor (1998), for example, consider the congruence of personalities in organizations. Studies in all of these domains have contributed to our understanding of fit. However, it is our contention that if we are to bring clarity to the literature in terms of its definition and boundaries, we need to invest some time understanding the factors influencing people’s sense of fit. How do they define fit? How do they separate the different types of fit, if they do? The answers to questions such as these should resolve many of our uncertainties with the construct and thereby make it less elusive. The purpose of the current study is to explore organizational member’s perceptions of fit at work. In particular, it looks at whether our current list of person–work environment fit domains is complete by constructing a taxonomy of people’s fit at work. In addition, we hope to gain some insight into the relationship between different types of fit at work, hopefully including some insight into whether or not fit is a generalised construct. We start by reviewing the extant knowledge concerning individuals’ sense of fit before moving on to describe a suitable methodology for capturing organizational members’ sense of fit. In a results section, we present a composite map of organizational members’ sense of fit. This map captures the commonly mentioned factors influencing the perceptions of 63 employees of a British university. Also in this section, we discuss some of the main themes and insights that the maps and in-depth interviews gave us about organizational members’ sense of fit. Billsberry et al Mapping Fit 3 Factors influencing individuals’ sense of fit Fit scholars have offered a range of factors that might influence people’s sense of fit. Kristof (1996) suggests that people require organizations to supply financial, physical and psychological resources and task-related and interpersonal opportunities. These dimensions stem from other literatures, such as those on motivation, job satisfaction and psychological contracts. However, there are an enormous number of factors that might influence fit given the diversity in people. As we do not have any form of map of these factors, researchers cannot yet assess the importance or universality of factors that might be expected to influence fit. Hence, an exploratory design, free from all external prompts, is required to survey the domain. A similar argument has been made by Bretz, Rynes & Gerhart (1993), who were the first fit researchers to advocate the use of non-directive research methods to investigate fit. They noted that the domain of fit was largely uncharted and the use of researcher-generated scales and similar methods risks slanting responses. Bretz et al. (1993) asked respondents to articulate their own conceptualization of fit, specifically requesting that they identify goodand poor-fitting candidates and critical incidents that produced these impressions through the medium of a structured interview. Their method forced respondents to describe the abstract construct of fit in explicit terms and in terms relevant to their own sense of fit. This type of study is powerful insofar as people are asked about their perceptions of fit, researchers’ intervention is limited, and the focus is directly on the factors influencing perceptions of fit (Kristof-Brown, 1997). However, there is a difficulty with this approach. By mediating the assessment of fit through a third party, there is an assumption that what someone identifies in others is the same as that which is found within them. The use of a third party in this manner might not always be appropriate. A similar issue has been addressed in the personality literature. In a study by Passini and Norman (1966) students were asked to rate the personality of other students to whom they were unacquainted. They were asked to rate the personality of these strangers by imagining what they were like. Factor analysis of the responses yielded a near identical structure to studies that had asked people to focus on people they know. This finding raised the question of whether this personality structure resides in the personality structure or in the mind of the observer. Does the finding tell us more about cognitive processes than personality? The major concern is that people may apply an uncritical set of assumptions and relationships when they assess someone’s personality (Schneider, 1973). Given this fear about the interpretation of the behaviors of others, in an initial exploration of organizational members’ sense of fit it may be prudent to use methods that focus on the respondent’s own sense of fit, rather than the observations of a third party. The P–O fit literature has not yet directly discussed how conscious people are of their level of fit. However, it has been argued that people’s sense of fit is held at accessible, subthreshold levels of consciousness (Wachtel, 1987). If peoples’ sense of fit is held in their consciousness, it would imply that they were thinking of little else, which is clearly not the case, except, maybe, for people experiencing a strong misfit. If, on the other hand, people hold their sense of fit at an unconscious level, it could not be captured by the methods currently employed by researchers. In summary, a method will be able to capture organizational members’ sense of fit if it exhibits all of the following characteristics: 1. It allows respondents to articulate their own conceptualizations of fit (i.e. they should Billsberry et al Mapping Fit 4 not lead the respondent other than to describe factors within the P–O fit domain). 2. It focuses the attention of respondents on their own sense of fit, rather than a perception of the fit of others. 3. It has the power to explore sub-threshold domains without too much conscious filtering or censoring. Researchers (e.g. Eden & Ackermann, 1998; Laukannen, 1994; Weick & Bougon, 1986) interested in intangible phenomena have developed research techniques, such as cognitive and causal mapping, that allow respondents to surface previously tacitly held thought processes in an explicit manner. We believe that methods such as these will be important when exploring organizational members’ own sense of fit.