Time Urgency and Job Performance: Field Evidence of an Interactionist Perspective1

Individual predispositions toward time urgency were assessed among 118 emergency room nurses and 145 small-town librarians. Following from research on person–job fit, according to which people perform better when the demands of the situation match their individual characteristics than when these are mismatched, it was hypothesized that nurses (who typically face high time-urgent demands) would perform better when they scored high in time urgency, and that librarians (who typically face low time-urgent demands) would perform better when they scored low in time urgency. The results, based on a standardized measure of task performance, were precisely as expected. The practical ramifications of these findings are discussed along with the implications for research on person–job fit.