From Person-Organization Fit to Person-Job Fit: The Changes of Selection Process in Korean Business Organizations

From Person-Organization Fit to Person-Job Fit: The Changes of Selection Process in Korean Business Organizations

&nbsp;&nbsp;Human resources are often considered as the most important source for securing the firm&quot;s competitiveness in the intensified global competition (Capelli &amp; Singh, 1992; Pfeffer, 1994; Snell, Youndt, &amp; Wright, 1996). Any organization that intends to compete through people must take the utmost care with how it chooses organizational members. Employment selection can be defined as the process by which companies decide who will or will not be allowed into their organization (Noe, Hollenbeck, Gerhart, &amp; Wright, 2000). Employment selection decisions over the course of an organization&quot;s history can either make or break the organization, since the decisions are instrumental to its ability to survive, adapt, and grow.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;Traditionally Western (mostly American) companies considered the assessing the applicant&quot;s person-job fit as the rational foundation for employment selection. Person-job fit occurs when applicant&quot;s proficiencies are congruent with the job requirement. From its simple inception evolving out of the scientific management, the process of determining person-job fit increasingly gained sophistication with identification of both statistically reliable and valid processes that can be used to determine person-job fit (Werbel &amp; Gilliland, 1999). This concept has gained even wider acceptance from practitioners after the development of the United Guidelines on Employment Selection Procedures, since employers have commonly been able to successfully defend employment selection lawsuits. Person-job fit is traditionally attained by first determining the demands of a job through a job analysis, which is used to identify the essential job tasks that an incumbent performs and the requisite skills, knowledge, and abilities to perform the job tasks.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;However, these days both academicians and practitioners called for closer examination of the validity of person-job fit model in changing environment (e.g., Behling, 1998; Kristoff, 1996; Montgomery, 1996). Carson and Stewart (1996) strongly argued that person-job fit is no longer appropriate due to changes in nature of work, organization, and employer-employee relationship. Another line of research that analyzes the relationships between the extent of a firm’s adoption of high-involvement HRM strategies and organizational performance also shed the doubt of the traditional model of person-job fit. High-involvement HRM strategy is more likely to provide HRM systems with higher social complexity and causal ambiguity (Bae &amp; Lawler, 2000). In this context, person-job fit is not only hard to assess but also not a very effective strategy to provide autonomy and discretion required to react to changing circumstances.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;On the other hand, Korean business organizations traditionally adopted person-organization fit for their selection process. During the selection process, assessing the congruence of applicant’s needs, goals, and values with organization’s norms and values has been the main focus of Korean firms (Von Glow &amp; Chung, 1989; Yoo &amp; Lee, 1987). However, recent literatures show that Korean HRM practices are going through fundamental changes. Bae (1997, p.93) succinctly described this change as “paradigm shift from seniority-based system to ability-based one.” Extensive environmental changes such as global competition and slow down of economic growth especially after foreign exchange crisis drove Korean management to reconsider HRM systems. This ‘new’ HRM systems in Korean firms may affect diverse traditional HRM practices depending on the specific organization&quot;s situation. In recruitment and selection process, one of the prominent aspects of New HRM system is the new effort to emphasize the person-job fit (Chung, 1994; Choi, 2001; Lee, 2001).<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;This paper is an attempt to compare this seemingly divergent movement in terms of person-environment fit perspective, whi