Slides created by Leah Hamilton, Mount Royal University

Organizational Behaviour: An Introduction to Your Life in Organizations

Chapter 2 Understanding Individual Differences
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Copyright 2014 Pearson Canada Inc.

Chapter Takeaways
What is your personality? How is the study of personality traits applied in organizations? What is your emotional style and why is it important in organizational life? What cognitive abilities contribute to your personal style? What values and attitudes contribute to your personal style?
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What Is Your Personality?

Personality
The unique pattern of enduring thoughts, feelings and actions that characterize an individual

The expression of the sum total of who you are biologically, psychologically and behaviorally Understanding your personality can help you know where you will fit in best within organizations

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Where Does Personality Originate?

Genetic Factors (Heredity)

Intelligence Subjective well-being (happiness) Temperament

Environmental Factors
Peer group influences Culture of your society

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How Is an Individuals Personality Determined?

Personality tests measure personality traits
Characteristics that individuals display over time and across situations

Self-Assessment (Table 2.1, p. 44)

Be honest in answering questions

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Locus of Control
The extent to which individuals believe that they can control events that affect them
Individuals with a high internal locus of control believe that events result primarily from their own behavior and actions. Those with a high external locus of control believe that powerful others, fate, or chance determine events.
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Personality Traits: Do You Have a Predisposition to Stress?

Stress
A state of tension we experience when our usual modes of coping are not sufficient Events or situations that cause stress are called stressors Stress that is experienced as positive (e.g., solving an interesting problem) is called eustress

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Type A Type B Personality Pattern

Type A behavior pattern:
Physical characteristics include a loud voice, quick speech, psychomotor activity, and facial muscle tension Related attitudes and emotions are hostility, impatience, anger, and aggressiveness In terms of motivation, high on achievement motivation, competitiveness, and ambition Appear alert and hyperactive and have high work involvement Cognitively, they want control of their environment

Type B is opposite
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How Can You Know Whether a Psychological Test Is a Good One?

Valid test
measures what it says it measures

Reliable test
Will give similar results if it is repeated

Is a test suitable for use within your organization?

Check if research of test has been published in scholarly journals
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What Is a Personality Profile? What Is the Big Five Personality Profile?

Personality Profile:
a test that describes an individuals whole personality, rather than just the separate traits that make up that personality

The Big Five model clusters different personality traits into enduring dimensions of personality that together describe the whole person

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The Big Five Personality Factors

1. Extraversion and energy (sometimes referred to as sociability, or surgency) versus introversion and passivity 2. Adventurous versus traditional (also referred to as openness versus closedness) 3. Agreeableness versus tough-mindedness 4. Conscientiousness versus undirectedness 5. Emotionality (also called neuroticism) versus stability
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Copyright 2014 Pearson Canada Inc.

Use Table 2.3 to determine your personality profile

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How Is the Study of Personality Traits Applied in Organizations?

Using the Big Five: Agreeableness and conscientiousness predict getting along Extraversion and openness predict getting ahead The Big Five is applicable cross-culturally

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How Does the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) Assess Personality? Four categories:
1. 2. 3. 4. introversion versus extraversion sensing versus intuition thinking versus feeling judging versus perceiving

Measures individual personalities along these four continuums to create sixteen (four x four) personality types
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What Do the Big Five and the MBTI Have in Common?

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What Are Some Personality Traits That Are Especially Important in Organizations?
Self-esteem: the evaluation you make of yourself in terms of your worth as a human being
Risk-taking: the tendency to take the chance of a loss in order to make a larger gain Competitiveness: having the desire to win even if an activity is not very important

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What Is Your Emotional Style and Why Is It Important in Organizational Life?

Emotion:
a momentary, elementary feeling of pleasure or displeasure, and of activation or deactivation

Mood:
an ongoing cycle of feelings that are not intense enough to interrupt ones ongoing thought processes

Emotional style:
the way you express your emotions; closely related to your personality

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Genetic Determinants of Emotions

Certain emotions are common to all human beings
Anger, fear, sadness, happiness, disgust, and surprise

All humans react to basic emotions with similar facial responses Your predisposition to a certain intensity of emotion is probably inherited Your emotions are closely integrated with your physical make-up
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Environmental Determinants of Emotions

Your family life Influential in how you express emotions Unresolved family issues may lead to emotional outbursts in the workplace Emotion cultures The characteristic emotional styles of different societies

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Task Determinants of Emotions

Certain tasks elicit emotional arousal in large numbers of people:
Public speaking Test anxiety Stereotype threat
When individuals have impaired performance on a test after being reminded about negative stereotypes of their groups cognitive abilities

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What Suggests Emotional Competence on the Job?

Emotional competence
Also called emotional intelligence or EQ A multifaceted personal characteristic that includes:
self-awareness psychological self-management social awareness and empathy relationship management

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Work Outcomes Predicted by Emotional Competence

Success in job interviews Positive work attitudes Altruism on the job Successful task performance

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Emotional Labour
The effort, planning and control needed to express specific emotions on the job Display rules:
Guidelines about how to interact with others, usually customers

Emotional dissonance:
The inconsistency we experience between ones felt emotion(s) and ones emotional expression
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What Cognitive Abilities Contribute to Your Personal Style?

The triarchic theory of intelligence:
Analytic ability:
Reasoning and problem solving skills; measured by IQ test

Creative ability:
Ability to produce innovative, high-quality ideas and products

Practical intelligence:
Common sense, also called situational judgment

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What Values and Attitudes Contribute to Your Personal Style?

Beliefs, attitudes, and values are aspects of our cognition (our ways of knowing) Belief
The conviction that a particular matter is true or false

Value
A broad principle underlying ones beliefs
Abstract standard of goodness that is often defined by the culture in which one lives

Attitude
The combination of ones beliefs about something
Based on cognitions, feelings, and behaviour
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Important Work Values

Job involvement:
Belief that there is a relationship between your performance in a job and your own selfworth

Work centrality:
The general importance of work in an individuals life compared with other activities

Ethical business values:

Principles/standards governing the handling of ethical situations in the workplace
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Schwartz Values Circumplex

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Values in Global Context

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Five factors identified by Hofstede:

Power distance Uncertainty avoidance Individualism versus collectivism Tough versus nurturing orientation Long-term versus short-term orientation

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Important Attitudes in Organizations

Job satisfaction:
A persons positive or negative evaluation of his/her job

Organizational commitment:
A persons emotional attachment to and identification with their organization

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Can Attitudes and Values Change?

Attitude surveys measure employee attitudes Companies can change employee attitudes by changing employee behaviors
Cognitive dissonance Self-perception theory

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Does it all matter? One view

Managers need to understand the different ways people are wiredthe differences in their interpersonal styles This is very really and very important for people to understand. It is critical to preparing students to be the leaders and managers.
Jerry Jurgensen, Chief Executive Officer, Nationwide

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