Measuring Job-Related Situational Strength and Assessing Its Interactive Effects With Personality on Voluntary Work Behavior

Abstract

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.

How Journals Can Facilitate the Study of Underlying Situational Characteristics Distinguishing Worker and Professional Samples

“…Situational strength, on the other hand, generally attenuates personality-performance relationships (Meyer et al, 2014). As mentioned by Bergman and Jean, job complexity enhances intelligence-performance relationships.…”

“…One obstacle to doing so is that neither I-O psychologists nor other psychologists (e.g., social and personality psychologists) have yet developed a thorough understanding of the structure of situations (Meyer et al, 2014;Rauthmann et al, 2014). One obstacle to doing so is that neither I-O psychologists nor other psychologists (e.g., social and personality psychologists) have yet developed a thorough understanding of the structure of situations (Meyer et al, 2014;Rauthmann et al, 2014).…”

Explaining workplace delinquency: The role of Honesty–Humility, ethical culture, and employee surveillance

“…To our knowledge, no research has so far addressed possible interactions between personality on the one hand and ethical culture or employee surveillance on the other, although research has investigated the interaction between Honesty-Humility and perceptions of organizational politics (Wiltshire et al, 2014;Zettler & Hilbig, 2010) and the interactions between personality and situational strength (Meyer et al, 2014) in the prediction of counterproductive work behavior. Both Zettler and Hilbig (2010) and Wiltshire et al (2014) found that Honesty-Humility interacted with perceptions of organizational politics such that lower levels of Honesty-Humility were more strongly associated with counterproductive work behavior when higher levels of organizational politics were observed.…”

“…Counterintuitively, Meyer et al (2014) found that Conscientiousness had a stronger (negative) relation with counterproductive work behavior when levels of organizational 'constraints' (e.g., organizational control mechanisms that reduce autonomy) were high rather than low. However, their study focused on general work constraints whereas our study focuses on employee surveillance.…”

Procedural Justice and Employee Engagement: Roles of Organizational Identification and Moral Identity Centrality

“…Through a metaanalysis, Meyer et al (2009) found that conscientiousness has a weaker positive effect on employee organizational citizenship behavior when occupation-level situational strength is stronger. Meyer et al (2011) developed a construct that measures job-related situational strength directly and found that employee personality traits have a weaker (stronger) effect on employee organizational citizenship behavior and performance when the situational strength is stronger (weaker). Conceptually, Mullins and Cummings (1999), drawing upon situational strength framework, argue that individual differences in the personality traits of strategic decision makers are less likely to exert influence on the firm's decision to undertake a strategic change in strong situations rather than in weaker situations.…”