Putting the “Person” in the Center

Abstract

This article provides a review and synthesis of person-centered analytic (i.e., clustering) methods in organizational psychology with the aim of (a) placing them into an organizing framework to facilitate analysis and interpretation and (b) constructing a set of practical recommendations to guide future person-centered research. To do so, we first clarify the terminological and conceptual issues that still cloud person-centered approaches. Next, we organize the diverse kinds of person-centered analyses into two major statistical approaches, algorithmic and latent-variable approaches. We then present a literature review that quantifies how these two approaches have been used within our field, identifying trends over time and typical study characteristics. Out of this review, we construct a unifying taxonomy of the five ways in which clusters are differentiated: (1) construct-based patterns, (2) response-style patterns, (3) predictive relations, (4) growth trajectories, and (5) measurement models. We also provide a set of practical guidelines for researchers and highlight a few remaining questions and/or areas in which future work is needed for further advancing person-centered methodologies. Keywords profile analysis, cluster analysis, latent class analysis, latent class growth models The "person-centered" approach has become an increasingly used concept within the organizational sciences. Recent publications (e.g., Morin, Meyer, Creusier, & Biétry, 2016) and a 2011 special issue of Organizational Research Methods (Wang & Hanges, 2011) have either used or explicated person-centered analytic frameworks. However, this term has also been used to simultaneously

Trust Profiles: Associations With Psychological Need Satisfaction, Work Engagement, and Intention to Leave

“…As far as we are aware, to date, no research has employed a latent profile analysis (LPA) technique to illuminate how trust intentions specifically interact within individuals and how alternative patterns of internal interaction may differentially relate to performance outcomes. We base this on an extensive search employing several search engines, which rendered no relevant results and recent reviews of the literature on LPA (see Woo et al, 2018;Spurk et al, 2020) that did not record any similar studies either.…”

Social demands and resources predict job burnout and engagement profiles among Finnish employees

“…Research focusing on the mean level development of job burnout and engagement has not been able to capture individual differences in burnout and engagement (Innanen, Tolvanen, & Salmela-Aro, 2014). These differences can be captured by person-oriented approach which seeks to identify various subpopulations of employees reflecting similar underlying traits or characteristics (e.g., job burnout and engagement) (Woo et al, 2018). Based on previous personoriented research it is clear that burnout symptoms do not manifest nor develop in a similar manner among all individuals .…”

Profiling a Spectrum of Mental Job Demands and their Linkages to Employee Outcomes

“…Because stress appraisal is a crucial element in the stress process (see Brem et al, 2017;Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), there may be individual differences in the extent to which work characteristics (here MJD) are appraised as stressful or accumulating by an individual. Viewed in this light, LPA is one appropriate tool to explore typical and atypical configurations of job demands at intra-and inter-individual level (see also Spurk et al, 2020;Woo et al, 2018) The second aim of this study is to investigate how the profiles of MJDs relate to three specific employee outcomes, i.e., job burnout, job performance, and meaning of work. These selected outcomes also form important criteria for the profiles of MJDs; the profiles should show meaningful variation in the outcomes or otherwise their criterion validity might be insufficient (see Spurk et al, 2020).…”

“…For these reasons, we trust the results obtained via LPA. Furthermore, LPA is superior over cluster analysis as it allows a statistical comparison of the number of profiles/classes, and therefore it is nowadays a highly recommended (person-centered) analysis method in occupational/organizational psychology (see Spurk et al, 2020;Woo et al, 2018). Naturally, choosing the most adequate profile solution should also be based on theoretical models and/or earlier findings, and here we relied on cognitive load theory (Sweller, 1988) and transactional stress theory (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984).…”

“…A related point is that person-centered analysis methods best fit longitudinal studies, where we can for example can explore typical and atypical (individual) patterns of human development over time (e.g., Bergman & Lundh, 2015). However, nowadays person-centered analyses are common also in work and organizational psychology (Spurk et al, 2020;Woo et al, 2018).…”