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Organizational culture has a meaningful impact on workplace behavior. Culture guides life within an organization by providing members with a common mode of thinking that helps them distinguish between what is and is not important (Schneider et al., 2013). Culture also represents the underlying persona of an organization – reflecting its most valued assumptions, beliefs, and ways of doing things (Pettigrew, 1979; Schein, 2006). As with individual personalities, no two organizations share the same culture. The unique nature of organizational culture has led scholars to investigate general dimensions thought important in understanding how diverse organizations think and operate. For example, O’Reilly et al. (1991) developed a framework known as the organizational culture profile (OCP) that summarizes an organization’s value system, or its culture, through seven distinct dimensions: innovation, outcome orientation, aggressiveness, stability, attention to detail, respect for people and team orientation. Each dimension is supported by a set of basic values that are not only general enough to describe any organization but also specific enough not to be equally characteristic of all organizations (O’Reilly et al., 1991). As individuals are socialized into an organization, strong organizational values – such as those reflected by the OCP – influence their work-related attitudes and behaviors (Schein, 2009; Schneider et al., 2013).
While scholars generally agree that an organization’s culture influences the attitudes, behaviors and subsequent performance of its members, confirming the nature of this influence has proven to be more difficult (e.g. Chatman et al., 2014; Chatman and O’Reilly, 2016; Hoffman and Woehr, 2006; Kristof-Brown et al., 2005). Investigations of individual work behavior and outcomes are frequently conducted by means of assessing person-organization (P-O) fit (O’Reilly et al., 1991). P-O fit is the level of congruence shared between an individual’s value system and the culture of the organization to which they belong (e.g. Morley, 2007; O’Reilly et al., 1991; Westerman and Vanka, 2005). Yet, previous research using the P-O fit measure to predict individual behavior has found predictive ability that is weak to moderate at best (Hoffman and Woehr, 2006).
The weak relationship between P-O fit and behavior highlights a concern with existing research. Specifically, conceptualizations propose that P-O fit predicts behavior based on identifying dimensions of culture shared by the...