Birds of a feather clock together: A study of person–organization fit through latent activity routines

Organizations often strive to recruit and retain individuals who would be a “good fit” with their core values, beliefs, and practices. Person–Organization (P–O) congruence is known to explain employee satisfaction, commitment, and absenteeism. This paper proposes a new measure of P–O fit by empirically investigating the similarity of routine within an organization. This measure of routine fit is motivated by the theory of entrainment, which refers to the synchrony of individual and community behaviors. We use unobtrusive bluetooth sensing to examine how the concurrence of latent activity patterns is related to job performance and wellbeing. Routine fit echoes traditional constructs of congruence as it is significantly related to higher task performance and lower workplace deviance. However, it is also related to greater stress and higher arousal. Prior work in organizational psychology has used single-occasion survey instruments to infer uni-dimensional models of fit. These methods are limited by subjective perceptions of employees. In contrast, we demonstrate a data-driven and multidimensional approach to study normative routines in an organization as a measure of P–O fit. We discuss the potential of our approach in designing technologies that understand the congruence of employee routines and positively impact employee functioning at the workplace. © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.