This meta-analysis investigated the relationships between person-job (PJ), person-organization (PO), person-group, and person-supervisor fit with preentry (applicant attraction, job acceptance, intent to hire, job offer) and postentry individual-level criteria (attitudes, performance, withdrawal behaviors, strain, tenure). A search of published articles, conference presentations, dissertations, and working papers yielded 172 usable studies with 836 effect sizes. Nearly all of the credibility intervals did not include 0, indicating the broad generalizability of the relationships across situations. Various ways in which fit was conceptualized and measured, as well as issues of study design, were examined as moderators to these relationships in studies of PJ and PO fit. Interrelationships between the various types of fit are also meta-analyzed. 25 studies using polynomial regression as an analytic technique are reviewed separately, because of their unique approach to assessing fit. Broad themes emerging from the results are discussed to generate the implications for future research on fit.

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Two studies were conducted to assess whether recruiters form distinguishable perceptions of applicant person-job (P-J) and personorganization (P-0) fit. The first study used repertory grid methodology with actual recruiters and mock applicants to demonstrate that knowledge, skills, and abilities are relied on more frequently to assess P-J fit, and values and personality traits more often to assess P-O fit. Study 2, which involved actual recruiters making decisions on applicants in a field setting, supported P-J and P-0 fit perceptions as 2 discernable factors. Study 2 also found that both types of perceived fit offer unique prediction of hiring recommendations. %ken together, these results present compelling evidence that recruiters discriminate between applicants' P-J and P-0 fit during early interviews.

Of all the issues in psychology that have fascinated scholars and practitioners alike none has been more pervasive than the one concerning the fit of person and environment. (B. Schneider, 2001, p. 141) Person-environment fit is defined as the compatibility that occurs when individual and work environment characteristics are well matched (Kristof-Brown, Zimmerman, & Johnson, 2005). Models of personenvironment (PE) fit have always been a prominent theme in the field of industrial and organizational psychology. The notion that people are differentially compatible in particular work environments is so well accepted that Saks and Ashforth (1997) called the topic "a cornerstone of industrial/organizational psychology and human resources management" (p. 395). B. Schneider (2001) concluded that "the concept of person-environment fit is so pervasive as to be one of, if not the, dominant conceptual forces in the field" (p. 142). Yet in the same article, B. Schneider also notes, "There is considerable ambiguity over what is appropriate research from a person-environment fit perspective" (p. 150). Thus, the purpose of this chapter is as much to review where research on PE fit has been as it is to illuminate what the research contains and where it is going.

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