Karen J. Jansen

A Policy-Capturing Study of the Simultaneous Effects of Fit With Jobs, Groups, and Organizations

The authors report an experimental policy-capturing study that examines the simultaneous impact of person-job (PJ), person-group (PG), and person-organization (PO) fit on work satisfaction. Using hierarchical linear modeling, the authors determined that all 3 types of fit had important, independent effects on satisfaction. Work experience explained systematic differences in how participants weighted each type of fit. Multiple interactions also showed participants used complex strategies for combining fit cues.

Using the web to look for work: Implications for online job seeking and recruiting

Purpose – The web is now a significant component of the recruitment and job search process. However, very little is known about how companies and job seekers use the web, and the ultimate effectiveness of this process. The specific research questions guiding this study are: how do people search for job‐related information on the web? How effective are these searches? And how likely are job seekers to find an appropriate job posting or application?Design/methodology/approach – The data used to examine these questions come from job seekers submitting job‐related queries to a major web search engine at three points in time over a five‐year period.Findings – Results indicate that individuals seeking job information generally submit only one query with several terms and over 45 percent of job‐seeking queries contain a specific location reference. Of the documents retrieved, findings suggest that only 52 percent are relevant and only 40 percent of job‐specific searches retrieve job postings.Research limitations...

Contemplating workplace change: evolving individual thought processes and emergent story lines

Drawing on topical life histories of physicians in a particularly volatile public health sector environment, we build theory around the contemplation of workplace change. Overall, our study provides evidence as to why single or multiple independent factors, such as pay or job structure, may fail to predict or explain individual decisions to stay in or change workplaces. Instead, the contemplation process we argue is a complex, evolutionary, and context-dependent one that requires individualized interventions. Our findings reveal the prevalence of episodic context-self fit assessments prompted by triggering stimuli, two mechanisms by which thought processes evolved (reinforcement and recalibration), and four characteristic story lines that explain why the thought processes manifested as they did (exploring opportunities, solving problems, reconciling incongruence, and escaping situations). Based on our findings, we encourage practitioners to regularly engage in story-listening and dialogic conversations to better understand, and potentially affect the evolving socially constructed realities of staff members.

Call for Papers: “Studying Change Dynamics Using Qualitative Methods” Special Issue

Organizations and organizational fields continue to experience transformations of various kinds—less hierarchy, shifting logics, more teaming, less co-located interaction, innovative practices and technologies, greater reliance on network structures and process organization—all of which create the need for renewed understanding of change and its consequences for organizations and pose exciting new opportunities for research. Given the complexity of organizational change, with its dynamic, disintegrative and situated nature (Langley & Denis, 2006), this special issue of JABS focuses on understanding organizational change through the use of qualitative research methodology. We believe that qualitative approaches to studying change provide rich and compelling insights into how and why change unfolds in organizations and its impacts at various levels. In the past ten years, there has been renewed interest in qualitative studies of organizational change (Weick & Quinn, 1999; Pettigrew, Woodman & Cameron, 2001), perhaps partly inspired by the change theme of the 1999 Academy of Management conference. Qualitative approaches are often the most effective way to uncover the particular and situated dynamics of change which in turn provide more general insights into how underlying motors (e.g., Van de Ven & Poole, 1995), divergent interests and logics (Lounsbury, 2007; Purdy & Gray, 2009; Reay & Hinings, 2009), and a multitude of internal and external contextual factors (Pettigrew, 1990; Denis, Lamothe & Langley, 2001) influence the process by which change unfolds over time. In this special issue we solicit empirical research that deepens our understanding of how organizations or organizational fields change to cope with the various challenges they face, whether those changes are externally driven through strategic responses to shifts in the environment, institutionally-motivated, or more internally driven. We invite submissions that examine change at one or more levels of analysis (e.g., individual, group, organization, field, global), that focus on the mechanisms, motors, or the context of such changes. Submissions should also inherently address the impact of

Fitting as a temporal sensemaking process: Shifting trajectories and stable themes

This study identifies several mechanisms and the overall process by which individuals understand their evolving fit with their work environment. Prior person‒environment research has emphasized one-time quantitative assessments of fit, primarily as new entrants enter their work environment. In this study, we employed a qualitative approach to investigate the following question: how do long-tenured professionals make sense of fit over time? Three key findings emerged from the fit-related histories we collected. First, we discovered four prototypical fit trajectories, which were constructed from temporal comparisons with past, present and future fit, and employed to make momentary sense of events occurring in the work environment. Second, we identified two fit processes that played out over time: a slow accumulation journey and a sudden identity-threat journey. Third, we found that individuals’ set of fit experiences was explained by one of four enduring fit themes, explaining their pattern of fit experiences over time and their reaction to misfit. Most surprising was the significant turnover among our long-tenured participants in the year or so following our interviews. Our findings break from traditional thinking about fit as predicting outcomes in the moment, to fitting as both a journey and a retrospective and prospective process of sensemaking.

Call for Papers: “Studying Change Dynamics Using Qualitative Methods”:

Organizations and organizational fields continue to experience transformations of various kinds—less hierarchy, shifting logics, more teaming, less co-located interaction, innovative practices and technologies, greater reliance on network structures and process organization—all of which create the need for renewed understanding of change and its consequences for organizations and pose exciting new opportunities for research. Given the complexity of organizational change, with its dynamic, disintegrative and situated nature (Langley & Denis, 2006), this special issue of JABS focuses on understanding organizational change through the use of qualitative research methodology. We believe that qualitative approaches to studying change provide rich and compelling insights into how and why change unfolds in organizations and its impacts at various levels. In the past ten years, there has been renewed interest in qualitative studies of organizational change (Weick & Quinn, 1999; Pettigrew, Woodman & Cameron, 2001), perhaps partly inspired by the change theme of the 1999 Academy of Management conference. Qualitative approaches are often the most effective way to uncover the particular and situated dynamics of change which in turn provide more general insights into how underlying motors (e.g., Van de Ven & Poole, 1995), divergent interests and logics (Lounsbury, 2007; Purdy & Gray, 2009; Reay & Hinings, 2009), and a multitude of internal and external contextual factors (Pettigrew, 1990; Denis, Lamothe & Langley, 2001) influence the process by which change unfolds over time. In this special issue we solicit empirical research that deepens our understanding of how organizations or organizational fields change to cope with the various challenges they face, whether those changes are externally driven through strategic responses to shifts in the environment, institutionally-motivated, or more internally driven. We invite submissions that examine change at one or more levels of analysis (e.g., individual, group, organization, field, global), that focus on the mechanisms, motors, or the context of such changes. Submissions should also inherently address the impact of