The Interaction Effects of Leader and Follower Conscientiousness on Person-Supervisor Fit Perceptions and Follower Outcomes: A Cross-Level Moderated Indirect Effects Model

ABSTRACT

The primary purpose of this study is to examine how the cross-level interaction between leader and follower conscientiousness influences person-supervisor (PS) fit perceptions, which in turn impact follower work attitudes and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Based on a sample of 1,204 participants in 167 work teams, the results of our cross-level moderated indirect effects model show that highly conscientiousness followers whose leaders also have high levels of conscientiousness experience enhanced perceptions of PS fit which result in higher levels of job satisfaction and OCB and lower levels of intention to quit. The study suggests that high leader conscientiousness serves as a supportive situational cue that motivates followers to more fully express their conscientiousness and act in ways consistent with their conscientiousness.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Also of interest from the Oh et al. (2014) meta-analysis is the fact that relative weight analysis demonstrated that PS fit accounts for 21% of the P-E fit impact (including person-organization, person-job, person-group, and person-supervisor fit) on job satisfaction (among the four major fit types), 20% of the P-E fit impact on intent to quit, and 59% of the P-E fit impact on job performance for North American studies..

² Although we believe that there is a theoretical rationale for including control variables in testing our hypotheses, our analysis showed that the results of hypotheses testing remained generally the same without controls.

³ We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out these possibilities regarding the testing of mediational models in the cross-sectional nature of our study. We understand these are valid concerns that can arise from this type of design. As a result, we tested whether leader conscientiousness interacted with follower conscientiousness to job satisfaction, intention to quit, and OCB rather than PS fit. In short, leader conscientiousness did not moderate the relationship between follower conscientiousness and job satisfaction (γ₉₅ = .01, s.e. = .03, n.s.), intention to quit (γ₉₅ = .01, s.e. = .04, n.s.), or OCB (γ₉₅ = .03, s.e. = .02, n.s.)..

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018S1A5A2A03029031).