A Cross-Cultural Examination of Person-Organization Fit: Is P-O Fit Congruent with or Contingent on Societal Values?

Len J. Treviño (), Carolyn P. Egri, David A. Ralston, Irina Naoumova, Yongjuan Li, Fidel León Darder, María Teresa Garza Carranza and Olivier Furrer
Additional contact information
Len J. Treviño: Florida Atlantic University
Carolyn P. Egri: Simon Fraser University
David A. Ralston: University Fellows International Research Consortium
Irina Naoumova: University of Hartford
Yongjuan Li: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Fidel León Darder: University of Valencia
María Teresa Garza Carranza: Instituto Tecnológico de Celaya
Olivier Furrer: Université de Fribourg

Management International Review, 2020, vol. 60, issue 2, No 5, 287-314

Abstract: Abstract Many single-country studies have examined compatibility between the individual values of the employee and organizational cultural values, typically referred to as person-organization (P-O) fit. However, little progress has been made in understanding whether P-O fit relationships generalize across countries and, if so, whether and how societal values impact this relationship. Because of this void, it is important to extend the P-O fit literature cross-culturally to explain not only how individual values relate to organizational values but also how societal values influence P-O fit relationships. Our study of 1,307 business professionals across six diverse countries focused on individualism/collectivism values at societal, organizational, and individual levels. We found that individual values are consistently congruent with organizational cultural values in individualistic societies, but found mixed results for P-O values fit in collectivistic societies. Our results provide more support for the contingency perspective (rather than the nested theory of culture) on how societal values influence P-O values fit relationships. Implications for the cross-cultural generalizability of extant P-O fit theory as well as for organizations are discussed.

Keywords: Person-organization fit; Societal values; Multi-country; Cross-cultural; Contingency; Congruence; China; Mexico; Netherlands; Russia; Spain; USA (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11575-020-00411-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:manint:v:60:y:2020:i:2:d:10.1007_s11575-020-00411-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/11575

DOI: 10.1007/s11575-020-00411-0

Access Statistics for this article

Management International Review is currently edited by Michael-Jörg Oesterle and Joachim Wolf

More articles in Management International Review from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().