Person-Environment Fit and Readiness for Change: Exploring the Moderating Role of Leader-Member Exchange and Perceived Organizational Support

This paper was aimed at investigating the interplay of multiple facets of personenvironment fit with individual readiness for change; and to expose potential moderators of this relationship, namely organizational support and quality of relationship with supervisors. The extant research on the relationships between person-environment fit and a number of individual- and organization-level outcomes reveals considerable discrepancies, mainly attributed to the measurement of person-environment fit and to potential moderators. With this in mind, moderated multiple regressions (MMR) were conducted in order to test the hypotheses of existing interaction effects.

The results revealed no significant interactions between facets of personenvironment fit and the moderators proposed. However, the significant correlations found between tenure and readiness for change dimensions led to a series of post hoc analyses to explore whether different tenure groups exhibited different relationship patterns across the variables measured in this study, and to investigate a potential moderating effect of tenure on the relationship between person-environment fit and readiness for change. The results indicated that tenure significantly increased the prediction of readiness for change by person-environment fit, underscoring the importance of workforce composition on readiness for change research. The findings obtained hold interesting implications for both research and practice concerning the measurement of person-environment fit, and with respect to the impact of individual- and organization-level variables on the relationship between person-environment fit and readiness for change. These implications, along with limitations of the present study, are discussed.