Situational strength pertains to the idea that various characteristics of situations have the ability to restrict the expression and, therefore, the criterion-related validity of individual differences. Despite situational strength’s intuitive appeal, however, little information exists regarding its construct space. This review (a) categorizes extant operationalizations into four facets (constraints, consequences, clarity, and consistency), (b) examines the empirical literature on situational strength—relevant hypotheses, and, on the basis of the proposed taxonomy and literature review, (c) provides several avenues for future theoretical and empirical research. It is the authors’ hope that these efforts will encourage additional research and theorizing on this potentially important psychological construct.

SummaryDebates about the utility of conscientiousness as a predictor of job performance have focused primarily on mean effect size estimates, despite theoretical and empirical reasons to expect variability across situations. The present study meta-analytically demonstrates that occupation-level situational strength is one important source of this variability. Consistent with theory, predicted uncorrected conscientiousness-performance correlations ranged from r ¼ .09 to .23 (overall performance) and r ¼ .06 to .18 (task performance), with stronger correlations observed in weak occupations. These results highlight the need for continued inquiry into the nature of situational strength, its impact on other predictor-outcome relationships, and the implications of these issues vis-à-vis theory and practice.

Situational strength has long been viewed as a useful way of conceptualizing and predicting person–situation interactions. Some have recently argued, however, that more rigorous empirical tests of its behavioral influence are sorely needed. The current article begins addressing this literature gap by (a) developing the Situational Strength at Work (SSW) scale, (b) examining the ways in which individual differences influence perceptions of situational strength, and (c) testing situational strength’s moderating effects on two types of voluntary work behavior (i.e., organizational citizenship behavior and counterproductive work behavior). Results indicate strong psychometric properties for the SSW (thereby facilitating future organizational research on situational strength), support for theoretically based predictions regarding the role of individual differences in perceptions of situational strength, support for theoretically based moderator effects on organizational citizenship behavior, and the presence of countertheoretical (yet strong and consistent) moderator effects on counterproductive work behavior. Thus, this study makes several contributions to the situational strength literature but also reveals important areas for future theoretical development and empirical research.

Notwithstanding a recent flurry of organizational research on the construct of "situational strength," research on the other side of the coin-"personality strength"-has rarely been conducted in organizational settings, has been scattered across multiple disciplines, has been called different things by different researchers, and has not yet been used to test theoretical propositions paralleling those in recent organizational research on situational strength. In the present review, drawing from several disparate research literatures (e.g., situational strength, personality states, traitedness, cross-situational consistency, scalability, appropriateness, selfmonitoring, interpersonal dependency, hardiness, attitude strength, and self-concept clarity), we (a) define personality strength and contrast it with personality trait, personality strengths (plural), and layperson conceptualizations of the terms "strong personality" and "weak personality," (b) briefly discuss the history of research related to personality strength, (c) identify a common prediction, emanating largely independently from several literatures, regarding the interactive effect of personality traits and personality strength on behavior, (d) articulate three novel predictions regarding the impact of personality strength on within-person situational and

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