Fit in the Future of Work 2050: Towards a Person-Skills Fit Perspective

What do antecedents of person-job and person-organization fit theories tell us when examining the future of work, and what are the respective theoretical and practical implications? Although the future of work literature is expansive, it has been subject to several questions, some of which involve the theories under which the future of work is studied. However, empirical evidence on fit antecedents for the future of work remains limited, leading researchers to search for an ever-growing but still unsettled list of factors, and theoretical progress in understanding the contingencies has begun to stall. In this article, we seek to address these gaps and help reinvigorate future of work research by focusing attention on a specific form of fit in future organizations—that manifested in employees’ competencies and skills. In the context of the future of work, the skills represent specific learned abilities that individuals need to perform well on a given task or job. Guided by these insights and by recent work that outlines future workforce challenges, we introduce and develop a novel construct to future of work research—Person-Skills (P-S) fit, that is, skills level and relevancy associated with jobs in future organizations. We illustrate how these changes affect the nature of person-job and person-organization fit theories and thus yield new theoretical and practical implications. We test these ideas by outlining eight research propositions related to the future of work and fit antecedents and by comparing and contrasting traditional and future organizations. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of this novel construct for promoting and measuring fit in the context of the future of work.