Some suggestions for mapping organizational members' sense of fit

Despite its importance in the organizational behavior literature, person-organization (P-O) fit remains an elusive construct. One reason for this is the lack of research about organizational members' own sense of their P-O fit. In this paper we discuss the criteria required of suitable research tools to explore this domain. Drawing on arguments from the cognition literature, we argue that storytelling and causal mapping techniques are suitable for exploring organizational members' sense of fit. We conclude with a short example of the method in action and a discussion of some of the practical issues that researchers will face.