Job fit vs company culture fit

Is it better to get an ideal job at a less-than-ideal company or a less-than-ideal job at an ideal company? Which aspect of employment (job fit vs company culture fit) to prioritize comes up frequently while job searching. While occasionally the universe deems that your dream job at your dream company cross your path, most of the time there's compromise involved on one or both ends.

A recent article at Overcoming Bias (great blog) seems to shed some light on which aspect (job or company) one should prioritize when job searching. Hanson (author) quotes a study about feelings of "authenticity" in the workplace: "People feel more authentic when they feel more accepted and respected in their [job], regardless of if that role is who they 'really' are." I think this is fascinating—the study suggests that the feelings of authenticity are linked not to beliefs about person/job fit, but rather with how much positive affirmation they got from their colleagues! In other words, there likely isn't any such thing as "feelings of authenticity", except as a measure of other things like respect and acceptance. I find this pretty intuitive; I'm a skeptic about essentialism (the view that there's a particular way I or you "really" are) so it makes sense to me that people get more value from the acceptance and respect of their co-workers than they do from doing some job that "fits" them in some mysteriously metaphysical way.

And apparently American workers aren't getting the sort of respect and acceptance that they want, since there's a lot of inauthenticity in the workplace, "When adults … were asked how authentic they felt in the presence of various people, work colleagues came in dead last". However, while authenticity generally correlates with a sense of well-being outside the workplace—e.g. studies have found that people who believe they’re acting authentically are less distressed and have higher self-esteem—inverse correlations with inauthenticity don't hold in the workplace: "being inauthentic at work didn’t significantly impact overall well-being." In other words, you don't feel worse if you're inauthentic at work! This is a surprising finding, since you would think a lack of respect and acceptance (which is what we've established feelings of inauthenticity are) would make people feel bad. I know I've always felt worse at work (regardless of the job) when I'm not feeling authentic, and that my lack of feelings of authenticity hurt my job performance.

Despite this, it's still tempting to generalize something from this like "Prioritize finding a company where what you do garners you respect and acceptance over a better "job/person fit" role where you might not be appreciated for your efforts." This maxim is definitely not logically implied (because the study doesn't explicitly link well-being and feelings of authenticity), but it's intuitive to me that good work can't make up for being surrounded by a lack of respect and acceptance, and being surrounded by those things might make up for just about anything. If forced to choose between a great role at a bad company and a bad role at a great company, I'd take the latter, because I'd assume there's a lot of potential upside from exposure to a positive work environment, while at a bad company even a good role would regress toward the mean (which is below average).

But I'm not actually convinced the maxim makes sense, because getting respect and acceptance are likely related to performing your job well, and performing your job well is likely related to "job/person fit", making the cause and effect confusing. And even if it weren't confusing, this insight isn't easy to implement into a job search. While it's possible to focus on finding employment at only good companies, job requirements themselves (as defined by the job descriptions) are quite particular, and so you spend much of your time trying to be an ideal "fit" for the jobs themselves, making it harder to focus on the bigger "culture" picture. And employers are obviously incentivized to look for candidates that are good fits with their available positions; even the companies that are explicit about wanting to hire (generically) high-potential, high-performing people rather than people for specific roles (e.g. Google and Tableau, from what I've heard from hiring managers there) must bias towards a narrower "fit" sort of hiring, because how else can you really hire someone except with regard to their ability to perform some job that needs doing (i.e. because no one else is currently doing it)? Tricky.

Perhaps the paradox is solved in light of the original insight about respect and acceptance being at the root of authenticity. Maybe you can hire a generic batch of high-performing people, randomly assign them jobs, and they'll all feel happy and authentic because they're performing well and getting respect and acceptance for it. But no employer is going to A/B test this—it's probably not even logically coherent to try, since everyone has skills and is specialized to some degree, so there's no such thing as generically high-potential.

I suppose in conclusion a balance must be struck between job fit and culture fit while job searching, just as it must between high potential and existing expertise while hiring. It seems the dilemmas of hiring good employees are just about as daunting as the dilemmas of looking for good work. Interesting challenges, I suppose, but I can't say I desire to be a part of either game for too much longer.*

*H/t to my wife, who rescued some of the arguments here from being pretty weak. It's probably more confusing now, but at least it's not so obviously wrong.