Person-centered analysis: methods, applications, and implications for occupational health psychology

As Benchley’s Law of Distinction makes clear, people often tend to explain others’ behavior by sorting them into groups, sets of people who share some common characteristics. In organizational theory, such groups are often referred to as profiles or configurations that “denote any multidimensional constellation of conceptually distinct categories that commonly occur together” (A. D. Meyer, Tsui, & Hinnings, 1993, p. 1175). As Meyer et al. note, while in theory any particular set of attributes could combine together in an infinite number of combinations, in practice, sets of attributes tend to fall into small numbers of patterns. Thus, “just a fraction of the theoretically conceivable configurations are viable and apt to be observed empirically” (A. D. Meyer et al., 1993, p. 1176).