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In 1987, B. Schneider proposed a person-oriented model of organizational behavior based on the proposition that it is the collective characteristics of people who define an organization. He further proposed that, over time, organizations become defined by the persons in them as a natural outcome of an attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) cycle. We provide a brief overview of the ASA cycle and review literature relevant to two facets of the theory. The literature reviewed provides some indirect support for the proposal that founders and the members of top management have long-term effects on organizations through the ASA cycle. The literature reviewed provides both indirect and direct evidence supporting a central proposition of ASA theory-that organizations over time become relatively homogeneous with regard to the kinds of people in them. Suggestions for future research on ASA are presented.
In the organizational sciences there is a fundamental difference in paradigms between studies of people who work and studies of the attributes of organizations in which people work. This difference has led to a scholarly bifurcation characterized by two parallel, yet largely nonoverlapping literatures. As a result, there has been a general failure to integrate the individual and organizational foci of theory and research inhibiting a full understanding of the reciprocal relationships that exist between individuals and their employing organizations. Some have begun to call for the integration of individual and organizational theories and research referring to this intermediate ground as "meso" (e.g., House, Rousseau, & Thomas-Hunt, 1995).
Recently, several investigators have attempted to fill this intermediate ground, crossing levels of analysis both in thinking and in data collection. One such example is the research program of Chatman and her colleagues (Chatman, 1989,1991; O'Reilly, Chatman,& Caldwell,1991) who proposed and tested a person-organization fit (POF) framework for understanding individual behavior in organizations. In their research, Chatman and her colleagues showed that the fit of people's values to the values of the organization they join predict individual satisfaction, commitment, turnover, and performance. Another example, and the focus of the present paper, is the attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) model proposed by B. Schneider (1983a, 1983b, 1987).
The ASA model outlines a framework for understanding organizational behavior that integrates both individual and organizational theories. The framework proposes that the outcome of three interrelated dynamic processes, attraction-selection-attrition,...