Journal of Vocational Behavior 31, 353-361 (1987)

E = f(P,B): The Road to a Radical Approach to Person-Environment Fit

BENJAMIN SCHNEIDER

University of Maryland

The title suggests the thesis of this article: Environments are a function of the people behaving in them. I first briefly review my personal saga resulting in the idea that persons cause environments to be what they are. Then I review a new conceptualization of organizational functioning based on the attraction-selection- attrition framework. Implications of this framework for various areas of study in I/O psychology and vocational behavior are then described. Q 1987 Academic

Press, Inc.

THE ROAD TO A RADICAL POSITION

For almost two decades I have grappled with the issue of person- environment (P-E) fit in the industrial context. My earliest research concerned the development of measures of work environments which would serve as moderators of ability-performance relationships. The logic seemed impeccable: people will perform at levels that match their abilities to the extent that the environment fits their expectations and preferences (Schneider, 1972; Schneider & Bartlett, 1%8, 1970). The only problem was it did not work. What did work was the intrigue the effort generated in me for conceptualizing and measuring “the environ- ment” under the rubric of “organizational climate” (Schneider, 1975).

But the theory of P-E fit had to be correct; everyone was writing about it (Dawis, England, & Lofquist, 1964; Pervin, 1968) and, if they were not yet writing about it, they were doing research on it (French, Rodgers, & Cobb, 1974; Hackman & Lawler, 1971). If everyone was right, the theory deserved another try.

My second effort was targeted on the interaction of person characteristics and organizational characteristics in predicting performance at work. In this effort I hypothesized that it was ability itself that interacted with the characteristics of the environment. Thus, in my first effort, fit to the

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situation was conceptualized as the moderator; here the situation itself was seen as the moderator of the degree to which the fit of ability to job demands resulted in a strong relationship between ability and job performance. Another way to think about this idea is that environmental characteristics were thought to depress or enhance the prediction of performance based on ability.

In fact, a review of the literature on this particular variant of the P- E fit issue indicated the hypothesis might be true (Schneider, 1978a). However, once again my own research failed to substantiate the hypothesis. My explanation for this failure was that the literature revealing the mod- erating effects of situations on ability-performance relationships was totally based on laboratory studies (Schneider, 1978b). As such, I argued, the literature did not account for the fact that the extremes of variance required for obtaining a significant interaction (moderator) effect typically did not exist in the real world of work.

This marked a turning point for me in conceptualizing P-E fit and the relationship of fit to other interesting variables of interest. Up to this point I had been concerned with the psychologists’ predilections to con- ceptualize everything as an individually based variable. That is, psy- chologists put all of the weight for explaining variance on individual attributes and view the situation as a moderator or something that in- dividuals fit. My own, and many others’ conceptualizations of the situation, lacked the richness of thought and research that characterized work at the individual level. I needed to find out more about other ways to think about situations and other approaches to understanding the role of situations in behavior.

This line of thinking led me inexorably to the literature on person- situation interaction, a variant of the P-E fit approach. In P-E fit, the dominant assumption is that good fit is like a jigsaw puzzle-a meshing of person and environment characteristics. The implicit assumption of meshing (congruence) yields the method of establishing fit-some distance measure or other indicator of profile similarity (Rounds, Dawis, & Lofquist, 1987).

The interactionists, as they came to be called (cf. Endler & Magnusson, 1976; Magnusson & Endler, 1977; Pervin & Lewis, 1978a), argued dif- ferently. They argued that a combination of person and environment characteristics, usually a multiplicative combination, produced something different than would be expected from a simple linear or congruence indicator of the two. In retrospect, this move to interactionism was a response to Mischel’s (1968) attack of personality theory. This attack argued that situations, not persons, caused behavior. Interactionists retorted that maybe it is more than just the person but it is certainly the person in interaction with the situation that is critical (Bowers, 1973).

The controversy over the person and the situation proved enlightening

E = f(P,B) 355

to me. I began to think that maybe both the person and the situation were important and that they interacted but that the interaction was of the form called “natural interaction” by Pervin and Lewis (1978b). By natural interaction, Pervin and Lewis meant the natural byplay of persons with each other and other facets of the social and structural environment that produced the observed behavior. Bowers’ (1973) paper helped me see the issue with clarity. He made two points that led me down the path I have followed to my current radical position.

The first was that research in laboratories showing the dominance of situations over traits does not reflect the real world because it fails to provide conditions for the kind of natural interaction which permit personal attributes to become manifest. The second point, more important for the present discussion, was that through random assignment of participants to treatments, the kind of self-selection into and out of situations that characterizes the natural interaction of persons and settings was completely ignored.

Bowers’ (and others’) points reminded me of the voluminous literature from vocational behavior on occupational interest measures and the theories of vocational choice, especially Holland’s (1966, 1973, 1985) work. Holland, it turns out, was saying the same thing as Bowers; people naturally select themselves into and out of situations. The difference was that Holland added the idea that people select themselves into and out of situations (career environments) that they fit and that situations are de$ned in terms of the attributes of the persons there.

Since realizing the implications of these points, I have become in- creasingly convinced that the focus in P-E research needs to be more on person variables and less on “situation” or “environment” except insofar as the environment or the situation are conceptualized in terms of person attributes. I have, then, reached the conclusion that situations and environments are important only insofar as they reflect the nature of the activities going on there. Since activities in environments that have an effect on people always involve people then it is the nature of the people in an environment that make it the way it is.

My hypothesis is that there is no attribute of a human setting (the kind we are interested in) that is caused by other than human behavior and that humans in different settings literally create different kinds of settings by their behavior. In contrast to, for example, Moos (1987) who sees four important domains of environmental factors (physical features, organizational structure and policies, suprapersonal factors, and social climate), my position is that the suprapersonal factors are the causative ones. As such they are the ones that require research.

It should now be clear how I reached the title of this article, i.e., that E = f(P,B). This means that environments are a function of the people behaving in them. Implicit in this definition of environments is the idea

356 BENJAMIN SCHNEIDER

that it is person characteristics that define behavior. Since person char- acteristics define what happens in a setting, it becomes clear that they also determine the physical setting, the organizational structures and policies, and the social climate.

THE ATTRACTION-SELECTION-ATTRITION FRAMEWORK

Over the past decade I have written a number of pieces on the idea that it is the people in situations that define them (Schneider, 1983a; 1983b; 1983~; 1987; Schneider & Reichers, 1983). I have evolved an attraction-selection-attrition model of organizational functioning that in- dicates why environments look and feel the way they do. The model is based on some simple ideas:

1. People are differentially attracted to settings primarily as a function of the kinds of activities that take place there. Since the activities in which people engage are determined by the kinds of people they are (in terms of ability and personality) it is ultimately the people in settings, not the activities, that are determinant of the relative attractiveness of settings to persons (Holland, 1985; Tom, 1971; Vroom, 1966).

2. Through formal and informal selection practices the people in settings also make choices; they choose to allow in (select) persons who are compatible with the setting. The more the setting restricts entry to it the greater the congruence of person and setting (Caplan, 1987). Indeed a goal of formal selection procedures is to ensure that the range of person types in the setting is restricted to those who fit it.

3. People leave settings, voluntarily or involuntarily, if they do not fit well. This is a well-documented finding both in education (Pervin, 1967) and in business and industry (Mobley, 1982). This finding, in particular, is used by P-E fit scholars to support the importance of the P-E fit concept. I use the finding as another piece of data to show that people continue to seek settings they fit well and argue that if they do not fit a setting well they will leave it-to find one they do fit well.

It is clear that if people are differentially attracted to settings, differentially selected by settings, and differentially leave settings, then those who remain in a setting will look very similar indeed. They will have relatively similar interests, values, competencies, and behaviors; they will, in fact, have had similar majors in college, participated in similar extracurricular activities there, and come from similar backgrounds (Neiner & Owens, 1985; Owens & Schoenfeldt, 1979).

Some tantalizing new findings regarding attrition from organizations have begun to emerge. These findings indicate that persons are differentially satisfied at work based on their personal attributes and not necessarily only or primarily due to some index of fit or due to the attributes of the setting (Pulakos & Schmitt, 1983; Staw, Bell, & Clausen, 1986). Staw et al. refer to this as a disposition to be satisfied. An alternative explanation

E = f(P,B)

is that people choose themselves into settings in which they will be satisfied, and it only looks like it is their own personal attributes that yield satisfaction. From the standpoint of attrition, these findings indicate why turnover in organizations is high for newcomers but not for oldtimers; newcomers are looking for a better fit while oldtimers have found one.

4. The structures and policies, the social climate, and the culture of the organization are determined by the people attracted to, selected by, and who remain with an organization. This is particularly true with respect to the founders of organizations (Schein, 1985) and the top man- agement people who run an organization (Miller & Droge, 1986). Miller and Droge, for example, have shown that the need for achievement of top managers explains more of the variance in organizational structure than do characteristics of the larger environment in which the organization functions or the technology which characterizes the organization.

In summary, the attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) model of orga- nizations argues strongly for the idea that persons cause the environment that is the E in P-E fit. There are a number of implications that follow from this perspective on the P-E fit question.

IMPLICATIONS OF E = f(P,B)

I enumerate below some implications of this radical view of the en- vironment for research on P-E fit. But first it must be noted that others before me have obviously conceptualized the environment in terms of person attributes. Murray’s (e.g., 1938) work on need and press brilliantly pursued by Stem (1970), Holland’s (1985) work on vocational choice, and Litwin and Stringer’s (1968) explorations of environments in terms of the needs of people in them all have a similar flavor to the ASA model. However, none of the other models puts quite the weight on people for the environment, the total environment, as the present conceptualization does. The ASA model argues for the dominance of personal characteristics in understanding organizational functioning and the nature of social en- vironments of all types.

In earlier papers on this topic (Schneider, 1983a; 1983b; 1987) I presented some implications of the ASA framework for understanding organizations. These may be summarized as follows:

1. Organizations will become ineffective in adapting to their larger environments to the extent that they permit the natural forces of ASA to operate. The logic here is that the ASA process builds up a certain inertia in environments and, if the larger environment changes, the adaptive capabilities necessary to change the organization will not be present. The implication of this deduction is that organizations must seek ditfer- entiation and diversity in organizational membership if they are to compete in a changing environment. This demand places great emphasis on re- cruitment strategies since the people ultimately selected by an organization

358 BENJAMIN SCHNEIDER

can be no different than the pool of applicants from which the people are chosen.

2. The I/O psychology and organizational behavior (OB) literatures are overly dominated by a situationist perspective. In I/O and OB ex- planations for such diverse phenomena as job attitudes, leadership, and socialization to work are treated as if the person is completely subject to “the environment” for his or her behavior, attitudes, and perceptions. The inclusion of P variables in explaining E effects offers alternative explanations for such diverse findings as conformity in job attitudes (Salancik & Pfeffer, 1978); the findings that individual differences in need states fail to contribute very much to understanding job characteristic- job satisfaction relationships (Kulik, Oldham, & Hackman, 1987; because the people differ little it is hard to find a significant moderator effect); and the observation that different kinds of leadership styles are effective in different kinds of situations (Yukl, 1981; since Es have different Ps in them different styles will be effective).

3. Organizational behavior is the result of a developmental process (Kimberly & Miles, 1980); organizations do not just come to be already formed. Because organizations are typically studied in a late stage of forming it looks like the behaviors we observe there are due to technology, structure, and so forth. We need many more studies of the etiology of organizational behavior. Such studies are likely to reveal the importance of personal characteristics as determinants of organizational behavior (Miller 8z Droge, 1986; Schein, 1985).

With respect to the P-E fit issue, in particular, the ASA framework yields the following conclusions and implications:

1. The E in P-E fit studies should be conceptualized and measured in terms of psychologically derived dimensions and characteristics. As noted earlier, the E is primarily attributable to P characteristics. Re- searchers, could, for example, assess entire settings with personality and interest measures as data for what the E is. Or, measures of E could be designed, as Stern (1970) did, around personal constructs. At Maryland, for example, we are beginning research on a measure of E patterned after the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Myers, 1980). This measure of E will permit some tests of the idea that Ps join Es they fit and will allow for study of some newly developing organizations to see the emer- gence of organizational types by knowing the person types who are attracted to, selected by, and stay with them.

2. P-E fit researchers should expect strong relationships between P and E. The relationships should be particularly strong for longer termed employees, for organizations which have strong recruitment and selection processes, and for the employees who remain in organizations that have high turnover rates. P-E fit should be weaker in organizations where employees are younger, in newer organizations, in times (or regions) of

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high unemployment, and among groups of people who have fewer al- ternatives available to them.

3. The myth of random assignment of persons to settings as the implicit model for statistical analyses needs to be exposed. I am no statistician but it is clear to me that studies of P-E fit always will have range restriction because the Ps and Es will always be correlated. Samples of Ps from any one E for studies of P-E fit, in particular, will yield non- generahzable results due to the factors noted earlier in point 2. Corrections for range restriction problems in analyses exist (Olkin, 1981) and they may be applicable to research on P-E fit.

CONCLUSION

In this brief article I have tried to show how I have reached the conclusions I now hold and to say what those conclusions are. In essence, I now believe that researchers interested in P-E fit kinds of issues have implicitly accepted the idea that E is somehow removed from P and that Ps do not choose, or cause, the Es we study. I have argued strongly for the P causes E idea for two reasons. First, I believe it to be true. Second, my perception of the P-E concept is that it is the ideal approach to understanding and predicting human behavior. It is the ideal approach since our concern, ultimately, is With the prediction and understanding of human activity. Human activity occurs in human environments and it is the people there who make them what they are.

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Received: July 15, 1987