THE PEOPLE MAKE THE PLACE
PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY
1987 40
THE PEOPLE MAKE THE PLACE
BENJAMIN SCHNEIDER
University of Maryland
A framework for understanding the etiology of organizational behavior is
presented. The framework is based on theory and research from interac-
tional psychology, vocational psychology, I/ 0 psychology, and organiza-
tional theory. The framework proposes that organizations are functions
of the kinds of people they contain and, further, that the people there are
functions of an attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) cycle. The ASA cycle
is proposed as an alternative model for understanding organizations and
the causes of the structures, processes, and technology of organizations.
First, the ASA framework is developed through a series of propositions.
Then some implications of the model are outlined, including (1) the dif-
ficulty of
inging about change in organizations, (2) the utility of per-
sonality and interest measures for understanding organizational behavior,
(3) the genesis of organizational climate and culture, (4) the importance
of recruitment, and (5) the need for person-based theories of leadership
and job attitudes. It is concluded that contemporary I/O psychology is
overly dominated by situationist theories of the behavior of organizations
and the people in them.
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
lind to the role of person effects as causes of organizational behavior
ecause the fields of I/ 0 psychology and organizational behavior have
een 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 co
ectness of my thesis I need to draw on the-
ories and findings from different areas of psychology, including personality
theory, vocational psychology, and I/ 0 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.
Co
espondence 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 PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY
I will review some of the literature on vocational choice, including exten-
sions of vocational choice theory and data for understanding organizational
choice. Finally, from I/O psychology I will offer some new interpretations
about the meaning of biodata prediction studies, the importance of research
on turnover, and the importance of understanding the etiology of organi-
zational goals for understanding organizational behavior.
In following the ideas I present, you will have to think about how
whole organizations look, feel and behave-your focus must shift from
the individual to the organization as the unit of analysis. You must view
organizations as situations containing patterned behaviors, as environments
that are characterized by the coordinated activities of interdependent parts,
including interdependent people (Barker, 1968; Schein, XXXXXXXXXXMy basic
thesis is that it is the people behaving in them that make organizations
what they are. My thesis suggests that Kurt Lewin may have overstated
the case when he hypothesized that behavior is a function of person and
environment, that is, B = f(P, E). My thesis is that environments are
function of persons behaving in them, that is, E = f ( P , B ) .
Interactional Psychology
Interactional psychology, a subfield of contemporary personality theory,
grew out of debates in the late 1960s and early 1970s between Mischel
(e.g., 1968, 1973) and Bowers (e.g., 1973), among others (cf. Endler &
Magnusson, 1976; Magnusson & Endler, 1977; Pervin & Lewis, 1978).
In a sense, the debate was long overdue. For almost 100 years more
individual- or trait-oriented psychologists-including such diverse people
as Freud and Raymond Cattell-had pursued their person-based theories
of behavior while the situationists, following in the traditions of Watson
and Skinner, focused on environmental determinants of behavior. Each
group established itself as a community of scholars, and each camp estab-
lished ground rules about issues of importance and the kinds of problems
appropriate for investigation.
Mischel XXXXXXXXXXopened the door to overt criticism of one group by the
other when he published his book, PersonaliQ and Assessment. The book
was a work of clarity and persuasion, supporting the situationist position.
The problem for personologists was that the book cast great aspersions on
their camp. Mischel’s social behaviorist position argued, for example, that:
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
In other words, situations cause behavior.
Most of the criticisms of Mischel that followed were attacks on the
extremeness of his social learning perspective. Some of the early critiques
were neither as scholarly nor as persuasive as Mischel’s book. The paucity
of effective rebuttal was solved by Bowers (1973), who, in one of the
most insightful papers of the 1970s, presented the interactionist perspec-
tive, My perspective, one influenced both by cognitive psychology and the
developmental epistemology of Jean Piaget, argues for the inseparability
of person and situation. While Bowers presented many sides of the in-
teractionist perspective and many reasons why Mischel’s conclusions were
suspect, his most telling argument concerned the data base Mischel drew
on for his conclusions. Bowers showed that Mischel’s conclusion that sit-
uations dominate traits and cause behavior was based almost exclusively
on experimental studies conducted in laboratory settings.
Bowers noted that one problem with laboratory experiments as a way
of studying the relative contribution of traits and situations to behavior
was that experimentalists play with experimental treatment conditions until
the different conditions have their desired effects. To set up conditions
to have an effect, and to then argue for the dominance of situations over
traits, seemed to Bowers an unwa
anted inferential leap. The problem
here was that precisely when the laboratory study does what it should (i.e.,
demonstrates an effect) it presents enormous constraints on the display
of individual differences, making it appear as if traits were i
elevant for
understanding behavior.
A second problem with laboratory experiments that Bowers noted was
that the major feature of the experiment, random assignment of participants
to treatments, violates a basic reality in understanding real-time human
ehavior-humans, at least in Western societies, are not randomly assigned
to settings. Humans select themselves into and out of settings.
Finally, Bowers presented some logic to suggest that persons cause hu-
man environments at least as much as environments cause persons. What
he meant by this was that persons are inseparable from environments be-
cause environments only exist through the people behaving in them knowing
them. In our own field, Weick XXXXXXXXXXhas made a similar point.
This logic suggests that it is the kinds of persons in environments who
determine the kinds of human environments they are. This point becomes
critical in what follows because Bowers’ and subsequent commentaries
on the situationist position in personality research (cf. Aronoff & Wilson,
1985; Epstein & O’Brien, 1985) appear to be equally appropriate for ques-
tioning the overwhelming tendency in contemporary I/ 0 psychology to
assume that situational variables (groups, technology, structure, environ-
ment) determine organizational behavior.
440 PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY
By way of summary, I offer the following propositions for what research
and theory in interactional psychology has shown:
Proposition 1: Experimental laboratories mask the display of individual dif-
ferences. This method, then, is inappropriate for studying the relative con-
tributions of traits and situations to understanding behavior.
Proposition 2: People are not randomly assigned to real organizations; people
select themselves into and out of real organizations.
Proposition 3: People and human settings are inseparable; people are the
setting because it is they who make the setting.
I want to build on these propositions to offer an alternative to the
situationist perspective in I/O psychology. My perspective rests on the
idea that people are not randomly assigned to settings. It argues that it
is the people who are attracted to, are selected by, and remain in a set-
ting that determine the setting. As I will show, it follows from what I
call the attraction-selection-attrition, or ASA, framework for understanding
organizations that technology, structure, and the larger environment of or-
ganizations are outcomes of, not the causes of, people and their behavior
(Schneider, 1983b).
The Attraction-Selection-Attrition Framework
The focus, or level of analysis, of what follows is on the organization as
a location for human activity; it is not on the individual. Thus, the review
of interactional psychology yielded the idea that environments and people
are not separable and that the people in an environment make it what
it is. We are, then, unconcerned with the individual differences within
an organization; our gaze shifts to understanding the differences between
organizations through a focus on the attributes of people.
I am going to show that it only looks like organizations determine
ehavior; it looks that way because we typically only study organizations
after they have been in existence for a while (cf. Kimberly & Miles, 1980).
When an organization has been in existence for a while it looks like the
people there are behaving as they do because of its (seemingly) nonpersonal
attributes. In reality the way it looks is a result of the people there behaving