The Linking Mechanisms Between Personality-vocation Fit And Affective Occupational Commitment Among Normal Undergraduates

There exists a long interest in person-environment fit (P-E fit) in organizational behavior, vocational counseling, and personnel recruitment and selection. Although a substantial number of studies have examined relationships between various type of P-E fit and a wide array of attitudes and behaviors, few of these have explained why or how the relationships occur. Moreover, in the limited literature on mediating mechanisms referring to the paths of how P-E fit relates to outcomes, researchers have primarily focused on person-organization fit (P-O fit) and person-job fit (P-J fit) as precursors within the P-E fit framework. So far, no studies have scrutinized the mediated links between personality-vocation fit (P-V fit) and outcome variables, which is inconsistent severely with the prominent status of Holland’s theory of vocational personalities in counseling psychology. Thus, this article integrated the vocational personalities theory and psychological empowerment theory to develop a model in which competence and meaningfulness, two cognitive components of psychological empowerment, partially mediated the relations between subjective P-V fit and affective occupational commitment. The model also hypothesized that intrinsic motivation partially mediated the effects of competence and meaningfulness on affective occupational commitment.Our study is situated in talent attraction context in terms of teaching vocation. Specifically, we investigated two samples of407contracted normal undergraduates and245uncontracted normal undergraduates respectively. These participants are potential applicants of teacher industry who have a clear vocational orientation concerning teaching technique and skills during their college program. We distributed questionnaires in class to participants, so as to measure each individual’s subjective P-V fit, competence, meaningfulness, intrinsic motivation, and affective commitment to teaching vocation.Structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis indicated that, for the sample of contracted normal undergraduates, the link between subjective P-V fit, translating that fit into cognitive experience in competence and meaningfulness, then converting both cognitions into intrinsic motivation, and showing that affective commitment towards the vocation. Besides the indirect effects above, subjective P-V fit and meaningfulness evidenced direct effects on affective commitment as well. Furthermore, a cross-validation analysis via multi-group SEM supported the equal factor structure among both contracted and uncontracted samples.From a conceptual perspective, the present study contributes to the P-E fit literature by responding to researchers’calls recently for increased attention on P-V fit in personnel recruitment and by explaining the processes through which P-V fit influences prospective applicants’ affective commitment to a given occupation. This study also contribute to the psychological empowerment literature by investigating P-V fit as a significant antecedent of competence and meaningfulness and by exploring greater integration of psychological empowerment theory with other promising theories that aims at predicting work behavior more effectively. From a utility standpoint, the results implicate that, rather than focusing efforts merely on selecting those individuals with high level of P-V fit, educators and managers would benefit considerably from conducting strategies that directly target the mechanisms converting P-V fit into commitment, or enable normal undergraduates to achieve competence and meaningfulness towards their prospective vocation during the college program.