RESEARCH NOTE

Fitting the person to theorganisation: examining thepersonality-job performance

relationship from a newperspective

Ioannis NikolaouDepartment of Management Science and Technology, Athens University

of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece

Keywords Personality measurement, Job satisfaction, Performance appraisal,Employees behaviour

Abstract The current study represents an attempt to explore personality dispositions andpersonality process in a P-O ®t context. A total of 227 employees completed self-report measures ofpersonality and job satisfaction and their supervisors assessed their citizenship behaviours, genericwork competencies and overall job performance. The theoretical approach of the cognitive-affectivepersonality system was adopted in exploring the research questions and discussing the ®ndings,which reinforced the signi®cance of a con®rmatory, theory-based approach in personality testing.The results supported the existence of relationships between personality and job satisfaction butnot between personality and the performance-related variables, although agreeableness andopenness to experience were related to performance for occupations involving interpersonalinteraction.

Edwards (1991), in an overview of the person-job ®t literature and research,suggested that the person and the job operate as joint determinants ofindividual and organisational outcomes. Kristof (1996) addressed this issuesaying that it concerns the antecedents and consequences of compatibilitybetween people and the organisation in which they are employed. According tothose two reviews, two issues in P-O ®t are important. These are thesupplementary vs complementary ®t, and the needs-supplies,demands-abilities distinctions. Supplementary ®t occurs when the personpossesses similar characteristics to other individuals in the work environment,whereas complementary ®t exists when the person brings into the organisationabilities and characteristics which act incrementally to the existingorganisational attributes (Kristof, 1996). The second perspective ofneeds-supplies and abilities-demands has attracted more attention, becauseof its application to congruence theories and vocational psychology. From a

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Received August 2002Revised June 2003

Accepted June 2003

Journal of Managerial PsychologyVol. 18 No. 7, 2003

pp. 639-648

q MCB UP Limited0268-3946

DOI 10.1108/02683940310502368

needs-supplies standpoint, P-O ®t takes place when the organisation ful®lsemployee’s needs, whereas from all abilities-demands perspective, there iscongruence between person and organisation, when the employee possessesand demonstrates the abilities to meet organisational demands (Kristof, 1996).Edwards (1991) has brought together these two perspectives suggesting thatneeds and abilities compose the ªpersonº angle, and supplies and demands theªjobº angle of the P-O ®t research. He described needs in terms of employees’desires, goals, values, interests and preferences, and abilities in terms ofaptitudes, experience and education. Surprisingly, employees’ personalitydispositions are not included in this domain and it was this lack which initiatedthe current study. As far as the ªjobº domain is concerned, Edwards (1991)described supplies in terms of occupational characteristics and attributes, anddemands in terms of workload, performance requirements and instrumentalactivities. As most P-O ®t studies have stressed the dynamic interaction ofindividual and situational variables for explaining work outcomes, the presentstudy attempts to examine the role of person (personality traits, individualgeneric work competencies and employees’ attitudes ± e.g. satisfaction andcitizenship behaviour) and situation (type of occupation) on employees’performance, using Edwards’ model of person-job ®t (see Edwards, 1991, ®gure1, p. 285).

Personality dispositions and personality processesThe ®ve-factor model (FFM) has recently dominated the ®eld of personalityproviding a signi®cant degree of convergence in the trait-factor analyticpsychology (Robertson and Callinan, 1998). Although it is impossible todetermine work behaviour from the effect of personality alone, because of theimportance of situational variables such as colleagues, supervision, jobenvironments, reward structure etc., personality variables can be signi®cantpredictors of work performance, when they are carefully matched withappropriate occupations and organisations (Robertson and Callinan, 1998).Nevertheless, the encouraging results regarding the criterion-related validity ofthe FFM do not provide an adequate theoretical explanation of how theserelationships actually work in everyday work settings, and why they explainsome of the variance in job performance. Further, the question of how speci®cpersonality dimensions interact with work-related variables such as jobsatisfaction and generic work competencies, in predicting job performance stillremains unresolved. Thus, in order to investigate the effect of speci®cwork-related variables on the validity of the FFM, the adoption of anappropriate theoretical framework was essential. The focus of attention wasshifted to social-cognitive theory and more speci®cally Mischel and Shoda’s(1995, 1998; Shoda and Mischel, 1996) re®ned theory called the cognitiveaffective personality system (CAPS). The most important contribution of thistheory is the identi®cation of ®ve cognitive-affective units as psychological

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mediating processes underlying individual differences. These personalvariables were the individuals’ encodings, expectancies, values,self-regulatory systems and competencies, which are not seen as isolated,static components, but rather as mental events which become activated withinan individual in relation to certain ®gures of the situation or of the self(Mischel and Shoda, 1998). A signi®cant asset of this theory is thereconceptualisation of an individual’s personality not as a simple aggregationof particular units, but rather turning the focus of attention to the organisationthat underlies these units, into a network of interrelations that operate as awhole. This sentence describes the central idea behind the present attempt touse the CAPS model in explaining relationships between personality and jobperformance via, and/or with other work-related variables, Under a P-O ®tperspective. These work-related variables are namely job satisfaction,organisational citizenship behaviour and generic work competencies.

Job satisfaction is, to an extent, an affective, cognitive or attitudinal responseto work with signi®cant organisational outcomes (Spector, 1997). With respectto the CAPS model, four of the ®ve cognitive-affective units may help to explainthe personality-satisfaction relationship. First, as far as encodings areconcerned, an event which occurs at work, or the interaction with anotheremployee or supervisor at work may not have the same effect on levels of jobsatisfaction for everybody within the organisation. As regards effect, aparticular task may be favourable for someone but not for somebody else,in¯uencing their satisfaction levels. As far as expectancies-beliefs areconcerned, an employee may feel satis®ed because expectations are ful®lledwithin the work organisation, or because efforts are acknowledged, or evenbecause of increased levels of self-ef®cacy. Finally, goals and values are alsorelated to job satisfaction. As was the case for expectancies, if employees’personal values are congruent with those of the organisation or if they believethat at the current positions they can satisfy the goals they have set forthemselves, then it would not be surprising to ®nd increased levels of jobsatisfaction.

As far as organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB), which is usuallyde®ned as a set of individual behaviours that are not formally or explicitlyrecognised as part of a job description, but in the aggregate promote thefunctioning of the organisation (Organ, 1988), it is suggested that employeesengage in extra-role activities because they have positive feelings about theircolleagues or supervisor or their work overall (affective unit), or because theyexpect that the appreciation of these actions by their supervisors or colleagueswill result in secondary bene®ts (e.g. chance for promotion or rewards)capturing the expectancy-beliefs and goals-values cognitive units. Therelationship of OCB with fairness and social exchange has also beendiscussed (Organ, 1988). Thus, an employee who feels satis®ed at work will bemore keen to participate in extra-role activities, or if she/he is treated fairly

Fitting theperson to theorganisation

641

she/he will also be more keen to engage in contextual performance. The sameoutcome will occur if they believe that by engaging in these actions, they alsoincrease the possibility of personal gains (e.g. promotion or pay raise).

According to the CAPS, competencies and self-regulatory plans refer topeople’s ability to perform potential behaviours, plans and strategies, whichlead to desirable outcomes (Mischel and Shoda, 1998). In work settings,competencies refer to employees’ skills, which are necessary to successfullyperform everyday tasks. Thus, an employee who is aware, for example, of hisor her ability to communicate or interact well with other people may use theseskills in order to increase performance, or may decide not to use them, If (incombination with the expectancies-beliefs cognitive-affective unit) he or shebelieves that it is not worth utilising them at work.

Competencies may also be subject to the in¯uence of the cognitive-affectiveunits. Thus, an employee may posses a particular set of work competencies(e.g. leadership, or communication skills) but may hesitate in using them atwork, either because of a belief that they cannot help in the successfulcompletion of tasks (encodings), or because they are not valued by his or hersupervisor (values), thus not resulting in superior performance (expectancies)or because he or she does not know how to make appropriate use of them(self-regulatory plans, competencies).

Research questionsAdopting the CAPS people are not ªhostagesº of their traits, but activepersonalities, that certainly have stable, dispositional personalitycharacteristics as expressed by the FFM, but also have the ability eitherconsciously or unconsciously to change their behaviour, simply because theywant to, like to, or have to. Especially, in contemporary competitive worksettings, employees quite often have to change their attitudes and theirpersonal approach at work in order to adapt to the changing circumstances oftoday’s work environment. The present study examines the relationshipbetween personal variables, such as personality dispositions, competencies andpreferences-values (OCB) and work-related outcomes, such as job satisfaction,work performance and tenure. The moderating effect of job type in therelationship between speci®c personality dimensions and job performance isalso explored. Following the principles of P-O ®t, it is expected that employeeswith speci®c personality dimensions, such as agreeableness and extroversion,will demonstrate increased performance at work in occupations involvinginterpersonal interaction, as opposed to employees with similar personalitycharacteristics employed in occupations involving less interpersonalinteraction. Further, the effect of extroversion and agreeableness on jobperformance, for this type of occupation, is expected to be mediated by jobsatisfaction, OCB and generic work competencies, since employees willªactivateº, according to the CAPS model (Mischel and Shoda, 1998), the ®ve

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cognitive-affective units in order to in¯uence tile levels of their workperformance.

MethodProcedureThe research design adopted in the present study was that of a concurrentcriterion-related validity. The employees completed two measures; apersonality inventory and a job satisfaction measure and their supervisorsrated their performance on three independent measures, one questionnaireassessing organizational citizenship behavior, a short job performance measureand a questionnaire measuring generic work competencies.

The selection of the organizations participating in the study was randombased on selection from Greek and European business guides. The distributionand collection of the material was arranged centrally through the HRdepartment following a structured, con®dential procedure. The employeesreceived an envelope explaining the purpose of the study and the twoquestionnaires (personality-job satisfaction). As soon as they returned theircompleted questionnaires, their immediate supervisors were identi®ed andthey were handed out an envelope containing a cover letter explaining thepurpose of the study, the names of the subordinates they had to rate and thethree performance questionnaires.

Sample and measuresA total of 227 employees participated in the study. They were drawn from 22small and medium ®rms in Athens, Greece. The majority of the participantswere females (n = 130, 57.3 per cent of the sample) between 20 and 30 years ofage (n = 107, 48.4 per cent of the sample), working in various occupations, suchas teachers, managers, accountants, in sales/insurance, etc. with a mean tenureof 4.3 years.

Employees’ personality characteristics were assessed using a Greekmeasure of the FFM (Tsaousis, 1999). Competencies were assessed using anew instrument (Nikolaou, in press) assessing three types of generic workcompetencies; action-leadership competencies, people orientation competencies,and communication skills. Organizational citizenship behaviours wereassessed using Smith et al.’s (1983) measure assessing altruism andgeneralised compliance or conscientiousness. Job satisfaction levels wereassessed using Warr’s job satisfaction scale (Warr et al., 1979), which was usedas an overall measure of job satisfaction. Finally, job performance wasmeasured using a short measure which was successfully used in a number ofstudies (e.g. Robertson et al., 1999, 2000) as an overall job performance score.

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ResultsTable I presents the descriptive statistics, reliability estimates and theintercorrelation matrix of the measures used in the study. None of the big-®vedimensions is related to overall job performance for the total sample. Alongwith the lines of the P-O ®t literature, tenure was a valid predictor of overall jobperformance, as were employees’ OCBs and work competencies, whichcorrelated signi®cantly with in-role performance. Further, job satisfaction wasrelated to most personality dimensions in line with earlier ®ndings by Tokarand Subich (1997).

As far as the personality-job performance relationship is concerned, oursuggestion was that the pattern of relationships with job performance foragreeableness and extroversion would not be the same across all occupations.In order to examine that, employees’ job titles were divided into two broadcategories with respect to the centrality of their interpersonal interaction.Employees working in managerial, teaching, sales, and human resources andtraining positions which involve increased interaction with other people, wereassigned in one category, as opposed to administrative, accountancy andscienti®c positions. Table II shows the intercorrelation matrix of the measuresfor occupations involving interpersonal interactions.

Table II shows that agreeableness, but not extroversion, is positively relatedto overall job performance. A comparison was carried out using the Fisher ztransformation (Rosental and Rubin, 1982), in order to examine if the effectsizes between the two sub-samples are statistically signi®cant. Theexamination of the differences, following the Fisher z transformation,showed that the existence of interpersonal interaction moderates the validityof personality traits. This is especially the case for agreeableness andopenness[1].

Hierarchical regression analyses were carried out (see Table III) in order toexamine the hypothesis that the effect of agreeableness on job performance, foroccupations involving interpersonal interaction, would be mediated byOCB-altruism, job satisfaction and work competencies (people-orientationcompetencies). Generally, the effect of agreeableness remains statisticallysigni®cant and is only mediated, marginally though, by OCB-altruism, sincethe signi®cance of agreeableness drops to non-signi®cant levels whenOCB-altruism is entered earlier in the equation.

DiscussionThe advocates of the CAPS model Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda claim thatthe big-®ve approach represents a taxonomy that provides consensus anddurability in the ®eld of personality psychology (Mischel and Shoda, 1998). Thepresent study incorporated the ®ve cognitive-affective units in the big-®veapproach of personality in order to explain work behaviour, under a P-O ®tperspective, exploring the interaction of employees’ personal characteristics

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Table I.Inter-correlation matrix

and descriptivestatistics of the study’s

variables

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645

(i.e. dispositional traits), skills (work competencies) and preferences and values(citizenship behaviours).

The signi®cance of preferences (i.e. participation in citizenship behaviours)and skills (i.e. work competencies) for employees’ work performance wasinitially identi®ed. Citizenship behaviours seemed to have a stronger effect onsupervisors’ assessment of job performance than work competencies,suggesting that supervisors value employees’ participation in extra-roleperformance. From a P-O ®t perspective, employees’ preferences and skills, asexpressed by OCB and competencies, were shown to be an integral part of theirwork performance and seem to have a strong impact on supervisoryevaluations of in-role performance.

The results regarding the validity of personality con®rmed that acon®rmatory approach is essential in exploring the relationship betweenpersonality and job performance. Agreeableness and openness to experience

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1. Job performance 1.0002. Job satisfaction 0.042 1.0003. Communication

skills 0.521** 2 0.151 1.0004. People orientation 0.510** 2 0.061 0.747** 1.0005. Action-leadership 0.681** 0.050 0.696** 0.733** 1.0006. OCB-altruism 0.757** 0.167 0.349** 0.502** 0.684** 1.0007. OCB-

conscientiousness 0.390** 2 0.029 0.316** 0.161** 0.233** 0.082 1.0008. Conscientiousness 0.129 0.262** 2 0.097 2 0.085 0.002 0.170 0.0809. Extroversion 2 0.064 0.150 2 0.217* 2 0.080 2 0.003 0.089 2 0.132

10. Neuroticism 2 0.003 2 0.230** 0.128 0.102 0.104 2 0.045 0.01011. Openness to

experience 0.216* 2 0.203** 0.253** 0.312** 0.242** 0.203** 0.11512. Agreeableness 0.218* 0.118 0.066 0.093 0.058 0.136 2 0.133

Notes: * Correlation is signi®cant at the 0.05 level (two-tailed); ** correlation is signi®cant at the 0.01level (two-tailed)

Table II.Big-®ve andperformance measuresfor occupationsinvolving interpersonalinteractions

Independent variables R R 2 Adj. R 2R 2

changeF

change Sig.

Job satisfaction 0.042 0.002 2 0.007 0.002 0.194 0.661Agreeableness 0.218 0.048 0.030 0.046 5.261 0.024OCB-altruism 0.757 0.572 0.568 0.572 145.895 0.000Agreeableness 0.765 0.586 0.578 0.013 3.489 0.065People orientation competencies 0.510 0.260 0.253 0.260 39.283 0.000Agreeableness 0.538 0.289 0.276 0.029 4.567 0.035

Note: Dependent variable: overall job performance

Table III.The mediating effect ofjob satisfaction,OCB-altruism, andpeople orientationcompetencies on theagreeableness-jobperformancerelationship foroccupations involvinginterpersonal interaction

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showed the most consistent relationships with the performance measures inoccupations involving interpersonal interaction. Agreeableness demonstrated aunique, although small, contribution in explaining employees’ performancewithout being mediated by preferences (OCB), competencies or even jobsatisfaction. As far as openness is concerned, it is maybe the case that it isdesirable for people working in positions where interaction with others iscentral, to demonstrate behaviours such as strong fantasy and creativity, andbeing open to new experiences, especially in the contemporary workenvironments, where the only steady characteristic is constant change.Another suggestion for the positive correlations between openness and theperformance measures for this type of occupation could be the link usuallyfound between this personality trait and measures of cognitive (Ferguson andPatterson, 1998) or verbal ability (King et al., 1996). This suggestion is furthersupported by the positive correlations between openness and the three types ofcompetencies. Its positive relationship to OCB-altruism was also surprising,since it has not been established in the past, suggesting that creative andimaginative employees are more willing to participate in extra-role activitiescaptured by the personal dimension of OCB.

The current study, despite limitations in research design which do not allowaf®rmative conclusions, has attempted to offer an explanation of the use ofpersonality testing. Reconciling personality dispositions with personalityprocesses may offer a new opportunity for research and for betterunderstanding of the role of individual differences in applied settings.

Note

1. Owing to limited space the results of this analysis may be obtained by the author

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