Helping Misfits to Commit: How Justice Climate Attenuates the Effects of Personality Dissimilarity on Organizational Commitment

In the present study, we examined whether greater personality dissimilarity would indirectly lead to lower organizational commitment as a result of heightened emotional exhaustion. We also proposed and tested the notion that the experience of being dissimilar to one’s workgroup members in the traits of (a) agreeableness, (b) conscientiousness, or (c) emotional stability would have the strongest positive effect on emotional exhaustion in workgroups with low justice climates. The data from 8196 members of the U.S. Armed Services confirmed the predicted negative indirect effect for agreeableness dissimilarity, but showed that conscientiousness dissimilarity resulted in a positive indirect effect on commitment. Contrary to expectations, emotional stability dissimilarity did not demonstrate a significant relationship. Multilevel moderated mediation analyses revealed that the presence of a strong workgroup justice climate attenuated the significant mediated relationships. Finally, we report supplementary polynomial regression analyses and discuss their implications for workgroup composition and individual career development.