Organisational theory is essential in the determination of the appropriate behaviors and management approaches that would yield the success of an organisation both in the short-term and long-term basis. Organisational theory encompasses the study of organisations for the benefit of identifying common themes for the purpose of solving problems, maximizing efficiency and productivity, and meeting the needs of stakeholders. Topics such as environmental perspectives in enhancing organisational development, neoclassical perspectives, and classical perspectives of approaching organisational management are central to the study of organisational theory. From this perspective, organisational theory acts as a complement for studies in human resource coupled with organisational behaviors. Studying organisational behaviors is integral to the derivation of strategies for organisational management that would result to alignment of all organisational workers to common themes, goals, and objectives that spell out the reasons as to why an organisation is established. Without employees, an organisation cannot exist. For this reason, organisation theory has links with person-environment fit or p-e fit. P-E fit refers to the manner in which organisational environment and individual traits of the employees match.
People working in an organisation coupled with the organisation itself have a central role to play in the determination of the manner in which the organisation’s environment and the persons working for it fit together to enhance organizational growth. Organisations select people based on how they can fit well into the job demands, ease of which the selected persons are able to articulate with changes in job demands in an attempt to adapt to training’s in addition to remaining totally loyal to the operations of the organisation for which they work. To fulfill these requirements of job environment, a person chosen to work for a particular organisation must possess traits that match the organisational environmental demands. This argument reveals why consideration of Person-Environment Fit in studies of organizational behavior is paramount.
Person-Environment Fit is best comprehended as particular facets of interactions between persons and situations, which make specifications of the match that exists between environmental dimensions and specific persons charged with particular roles in an organisation. In this extent, P-E theory serves as a tool for the provision of theoretical paradigms on conducting assessments, which aid in predicting how traits of people who work in an organisation coupled with the work environment interact jointly to determine worker well-being and how a model for identifying points of preventive intervention may be elaborated. By consideration of how influential person-situation interaction is to the success of an organisation that fosters cross-cultural interaction of people, large bodies of scientific literature exists on person-situation fit from the domain of organisational human resource management. However, confusion persists based on how person-environment fit can be operationalized and or conceptualized. One of the critical reasons why this confusion exist is because the person-environment fit encompasses a number of subsets such as person-supervisor fit and person-job fit, which have been shown to be different. In the discussion of P-E fit, the P (characteristics of a given person) implies the abilities and the needs of the person. The E (environmental characteristics) refers to the opportunities and available supplies that are essential for helping a person to meet the demands that are placed to provoke the perception of a person’s abilities and needs in relation to successful achievement of the task requirements. In this perspective, demand-ability fit refers to the degree to which the job’s demands are met by the employee’s skills and abilities. The statements of goals, objectives, and missions of an organisation set out job demands.
A conception framework for Person-Environment Fit needs to equate P to E meaning that individuals’ needs and abilities should correspond to and or act as precise reflections of the ability to meet the demands of a job spelt out in the organisations’ missions, goals, and objective statements. Indeed, organizational culture, which spells out the overall acceptable codes of conduct for all organisational employees, is fundamentally rested on the platforms of ensuring that the abilities of the employees and their needs are in harmony with the operations of an organisation. The management arm in an organisation serves as an incredible tool for ensuring that this objective is achieved. This argument perhaps reveals why the study of organisational behavior from the perspective of P-E fit cannot segregate management theory. Emphasis on the significance of P-E fit is essential since many scholars perceive positive outcomes for P-E fit as having the ability to yield positive outcomes that directly relate with increased employee productivity.
As stated before, the concern is on person-environment fit. The environment may comprise other people or the organisation. Therefore, person-person fit entangles a conceptualization of how individual cultural preferences of particular individuals affect or relate with cultural preferences of other people in an organisation. Person-person fit is anchored on the theoretical paradigm of similarity and attraction, which holds, people are drawn to others based on their values, altitudes, and opinions. Among the many facets of person-person fit, person-supervisor fit stands out as the most studied. In fact, a person-supervisor fit is related to positive outcomes among supervisors in terms of supervisors satisfaction.
Person-organisation fit considers the compatibility that exists between people and organisations for which they work. The compatibility occurs in a number of scenarios. One of the scenarios is where entities within an organisation provide what persons working for an organisation need. For this case to happen, an organisation coupled with the people it employees must have some common characteristics. Additionally, compatibly between the organisation and employees also occurs in case the high value congruence is a large facet of person–organisation fit, which implies a strong culture and shared values among co-workers. Such compatibility has the overall implication of making employees develop a high sense of trust coupled with the creation of a culture of corporate community. Organisations benefit from value congruence that is created by positive person-organisation fit in the sense that, when an organisation operates in harmony with both its values and the values of the employees, instances of labor turnover are reduced tremendously while organizational commitment and citizenship behaviors are increased. People are normally attracted to look out for job opportunities in organisations having high considerations of the fit between person-organization. Arguably, studies of organisational management explore these concerns, which are specialized to concentrate on the fit between cross-cultural management and person-environment fit. At the heart of the studies is the need to come up with managerial approaches, which curtail incidences of conflict between an organizational cultures and individual cultural preferences of the employees. Conflicts of organisational and cross cultures of employees are particularly significant in the globalization age in which global organisations cannot avoid employing people from diverse cultural backgrounds.