BUS603: Managing People

To attract employees for leadership positions, firms are likely to use a great number of recruitment channels to find motivated candidates. From the perspective of the recipients of the recruitment messages, these messages may either generate interest in the organization or not. In terms of the STOA model, situation activation is the main mechanism in the attraction phase. Prospective employees are mainly attracted to organizations based on the perception of the nature of work and the organizational culture. Whereas vocational interests are the most important determinant of vocational (job) choice, which plays a role in the earlier phase of a career, personality may play an important role in determining organizational culture preference in later career stages. Only few studies have been conducted on the relations between personality and organizational culture preference, and none have been conducted using the HEXACO model, but findings do suggest that personality plays an important role in line with the TNT described above. That is, of all relations explored between self- and peer-reported personality and self-reported organizational culture preference, found agreeableness to be the most important negative predictor of an aggressive organizational culture preference, suggesting that people with a high level of TNT disagreeableness are more likely to apply for an organization which is more likely to condone aggression. The second most important relation was between conscientiousness and preference for an outcome-oriented culture, suggesting that careless people are more likely to apply for an organization that is less outcome-oriented. In a sample of students, attractiveness of a sales job with "out of town travel" was highest among students with low conscientiousness and low agreeableness, suggesting that careless and disagreeable people are more likely to apply for organizations that offer these types of "away-from-work" fringe benefits. With respect to dishonesty, low scorers on honesty-humility are motivated by wealth, privilege, and status. So it may seem logical to assume that organizations that "flaunt" these kinds of characteristics are more likely to be attractive to dishonest people. Empirical evidence suggests that this is indeed the case; i.e., people low on honesty-humility are more likely to be attracted to power and money than people high on honesty-humility. The evidence further finds that people low on honesty-humility, not people high on honesty-humility, were more likely to be attracted to an organization with a CEO who was morally questionable.