Matching Employees with Jobs

Introduction

Empirical evidence indicates that organizations that successfully retain their top talent will significantly thrive. Although both academicians and practitioners believe that human capital is the most valuable asset to an organization, the retention of high skilled talent has always been one of the major challenges. It has been noted that high voluntary turnover hampers the strategic objectives of organizations and becomes a severe threat to their competitive advantage. Undeniably, the loss of high skilled talent not only creates financial constraints, it also affects the productivity of the organization, low morale of the other employees, as well as loss of organizational memory. The cost incurred in each voluntary movement is equivalent to approximately 25% to 33% of the annual salary of each of the individuals who leave. Despite the severe consequences this creates, organizations around the globe are constantly facing a high number of voluntary quits.

Parsa, Tesone, and Templeton believe that the flaws in the selection process of the organizations could be one of the reasons for such a high rate of voluntary turnover. In short, it may be possible that selected individuals do not fit in with the organization's environment, and, ultimately, decide to leave that organization for a better fit. Past studies revealed that the existence of fit produces more favourable attitudes-experience, greater well-being and better performance. The literature often indicated two different forms of fit, such as P-J fit and P-O fit. The P-J fit is defined as the "relationship between a person's characteristics and those of the job or tasks that are performed at work", whereas the P-O fit addresses "the compatibility between individuals and the organization". Both the P-J fit and P-O fit have been found to be significantly negatively related with turnover intention. In addition, both are positively linked with job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and organizational citizenship behaviour, and job performance.

Despite the fact that considerable research has been conducted on the P-J and P-O fit, an in depth scrutiny of the literature identifies three main issues. First, although both forms of fit have long been the centre of attention for organizational behaviour and industrial/organizational psychology, studies have largely focused on examining them separately rather than incorporating both types in a single model. Second, most of the available research examined the roles of the P-J fit and P-O fit in respect of various individual and organizational outcomes, such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behaviour and turnover. In doing so, studies most often investigated how antecedents predict outcomes. However, minimal effort has been made to explore the consequences of these individual and organizational outcomes.

Drawing on the multidimensional model of Saks, we emphasize the need for a third step, which, so far, is missing. It is expected that the addition of a third-step would support the evaluation of the outcomes (in terms of the consequences of the overall model) of the variables and extend the overall scope of the framework. Lastly, although employee engagement has been a topic of great interest in recent times, to date, little is known about its relationship with P-J fit and P-O fit.

Based on the above argument and past literature, the present paper makes a twofold contribution. First, it integrates both the P-J fit and P-O fit into a single model. Second, the paper proposes a three-step conceptual framework that theoretically links P-J and P-O fit (as antecedents) employee engagement (outcome) and integrates the intention (consequence). As a whole, the paper constitutes a valuable extension to the research on fit, employee engagement and turnover. A brief discussion on the constructs is presented in the following section.