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The People Make The Place: Personnel Psychology !987, 40
The People Make The Place: Personnel Psychology !987, 40
!987, 40
BENJAMIN SCHNEIDER
Univereity of Maryland
This talk is about people and places: about how the kinds of people
in a place—a work organization, for example—come to define the way
that place looks, feels, and behaves. My main thesis is that the attributes
of people, not the nature of the external environment, or organizational
technology, or organizational structure, are the fundamental determinants
of organizational behavior. I will try to persuade you that we have been
blind to the role of person effects as causes of organizational behavior
because the fields of I/O psychology and organizational behavior have
been seduced into the belief that situations determine behavior (see also
Schneider, 1983a, 1983b, 1983c; Schneider & Reichers, 1983; Staw &
Ross, 1985).
To convince you of the correctness of my thesis I need to draw on the-
ories and findings from different areas of psychology, including personality
theory, vocational psychology, and I/O psychology. From personality the-
ory some recent debates over whether behavior is situationally, personally,
or interactionally caused will be summarized. From vocational psychology.
This is a slightly modified form of my Presidential Address to the Society for Industrial and
Organizational Psychology, American Psychological Association Convention, Los Angeles,
August, 1985.
Correspondence and requests for reprints should be addressed to Benjamin Schneider,
Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742.
COPYRIGHT © 1987 PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY, INC.
437
438 PERSOhfNEL PSYCHOLOGY
Interactional Psychology
Although it is evident that persons are the source from which human re-
sponses are evoked, it is situational stimuli that evoke them, and it is changes
in conditions that alter them. Since the assumption of massive behavioral
similarity across diverse situations no longer is tenable, it becomes essential
to study the difference in the behaviors of a given person as a function of
the conditions in which they occur (1968, p. 295).
BENJAMIN SCHNEIDER 439
N T E R A C T I O N I S M
ATTRACTION
ORGANIZATIONAL
GOALS
ATTRITION
goals detennine the kinds of people who are attracted to, are selected by,
and stay with a particular organization. Over time, persons attracted to,
selected by, staying with, and behaving in organizations cause them to be
what they are.
Over time, in fact, an organization can become so ingrown in type
that it begins to occupy an increasingly narrow ecological niche (Aldrich,
1979). When this happens, the organization can fail—its people, structures
and processes may become so appropriate for a particular segment of the
environment that, when the environment changes, the kinds of people.
446 PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY
In other words, the sixth implication of the ASA model is that people
in a setting will have the same job attitudes. In fact, the ASA model makes
an even more interesting prediction. It predicts that the "same" organi-
zational conditions will be differentially satisfying to people in different
work environments and, conversely, that different work conditions can be
equally satisfying to the people in different settings. So, the ASA frame-
work predicts that a level of pay that may be very satisfying to community
mental health center employees may be quite dissatisfying to stockbrokers.
Or conversely, a considerate boss may have greater impact on a community
mental health worker's attitudes than on a stockbroker's.
In other words, the ASA framework cautions against a situationist in-
terpretation of what makes for positive job attitudes. It says that positive
job attitudes for workers in an organization can be expected when the nat-
ural inclinations of the persons there are allowed to be refiected in their
behaviors by the kinds of processes and structures that have evolved there.
In fact, there is some evidence now that people's job attitudes may come
with them to a setting (Pulakos & Schmitt, 1983; Staw, Bell & Clausen,
1986; Staw & Ross, 1985). These kinds of data indicate the need for an
alternative to situationism in the study of job attitudes.
Summary
The main thesis of the ASA perspective is that organizations are the
people in them: that the people make the place. I have presented the
idea that I/O psychologists have failed to incorporate people types into our
theories of organizations. Failure to understand organizations as people has
resulted in at least the following:
1. We have tried to change organizations by changing their structures
and processes when it was the people that needed changing. With changes
in people, the necessary changes in structure and process will occur. We
have also probably oversold the speed with which organizations can change;
change will be slow.
2. We have assisted organizations in their inadvertent slide into decline
by implementing selection systems that might further restrict the range of
their adaptive capability.
3. We have accepted situationist interpretations of clearly psychological
phenomena such as job attitudes, organizational climate, and leadership. In
addition, we have implicitly accepted the idea that organizational forms and
functions are determined by phenomena outside individuals' attributes; we
have accepted environmental determinism.
4. We have erroneously accepted the idea that personality and interest
measures are not useful; they can be tremendously useful in understanding
organizations. But even in more micro studies, we have passively accepted
BENJAMIN SCHNEIDER 451
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