2007 Prentice Hall

Organizational Behavior:
An Introduction to
Your Life in Organizations
Chapter 2
Your Personality and Style
2007 Prentice Hall
Preview
What is your personality?
How is the Big Five personality profile
used 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?
2007 Prentice Hall
What is your personality?
Personality is 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.
When you know who you are, you can
figure out where you best fit in.
2007 Prentice Hall
Where does personality originate?
Genetic Factors
(Heredity)

Intelligence
Subjective well-being
(happiness)
Temperament
Environmental
Factors

Peer group
influences
Culture of your
society
2007 Prentice Hall
How do psychologists determine an
individuals personality?
Personality tests measure personality
traits
Need to be honest in answering questions
Example: Internal-External Locus of
Control
Follow instructions in Tables 2.1 and 2.2
2007 Prentice Hall
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.
2007 Prentice Hall
How can you know whether a
psychological test is a good one?
Valid one that measures what it says it
measures
Reliable one that when repeated will
give similar results
Check if research of test has been
published in scholarly journals
2007 Prentice Hall
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.
2007 Prentice Hall
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
2007 Prentice Hall
Use Table 2.3 to determine
your personality profile
Summarize your profile using
Table 2.4
2007 Prentice Hall
How is the study of personality traits
applied in organizations?
Using the Big Five :
Conscientiousness predicts motivation to
perform well in a job
Personality is not related to cognitive ability
Agreeableness and conscientiousness predict
getting along
Extraversion and openness predict getting
ahead
The Big Five is applicable cross-culturally
2007 Prentice Hall
What other behaviors does the Big Five profile
predict?
2007 Prentice Hall
How does the Myers-Briggs Type
Indicator (MBTI) assess personality?
Four categories:
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
2007 Prentice Hall
What do the Big Five and the MBTI
have in common?
2007 Prentice Hall
What are some personality variables that are
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
2007 Prentice Hall
What is a psychological disorder?
Suffering significant pain and stress, and
also maladaptive functioning, due to
biological factors, learned habits, or
mental processes, rather than situational
influences
Examples:
narcissistic personality disorder
antisocial personality disorder
2007 Prentice Hall
What is your emotional style and its
importance 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 your
ongoing thought processes
Emotional style: the way you express your
emotions; closely related to your
personality
2007 Prentice Hall
Genetic determinants of emotions
Certain emotions are common to all
human beings
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
2007 Prentice Hall
Environmental determinants of
emotions
Your family life
taught you how
to express your
emotions, and
made you want
to emote in
certain ways
Different societies
have different
emotion cultures,
which influence
your personal
emotional style
2007 Prentice Hall
Task determinants of emotions
Certain tasks elicit emotional arousal in
large numbers of people:
Public speaking
Test anxiety
Stereotype threat
2007 Prentice Hall
What suggests emotional
competence on the job?
Emotional competence, also referred to as
emotional intelligence and EQ, is a
multi-faceted personal characteristic that
includes:
self-awareness
psychological self-management
social awareness and empathy
relationship management
2007 Prentice Hall
Emotional competence predicts:
Success in job interviews
Positive work attitudes
Altruism on the job
Successful task performance
2007 Prentice Hall
Emotional labor
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 a felt emotion and
our emotional expression
2007 Prentice Hall
What cognitive abilities contribute to
your personal style?
Described using 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: situational judgment
or common sense
2007 Prentice Hall
What values and attitudes contribute
to your personal style?
Definitions
Belief: a particular matter that you consider to be
true or false
Value: a broad principle that underlies your
beliefs
Attitude: combines our beliefs about that object
(our cognitions) with our feelings (affect) and
actions (behavior) toward it
2007 Prentice Hall
Schwartz values circumplex
2007 Prentice Hall
Important work values
Job involvement: belief that there is a
relationship between your performance in
a job and your own self-worth
Work centrality: the general importance of
work in an individuals life compared with
other activities
Ethical business values
2007 Prentice Hall
Global work values identified by
Hofstede
1. Power distance
2. Uncertainty avoidance
3. Individualism versus collectivism
4. Tough versus nurturing orientation
5. Long-term versus short-term orientation
2007 Prentice Hall
Attitudes important to organizations
Job satisfaction: a persons positive or
negative evaluation of their job
Organizational commitment: a persons
emotional attachment to and identification
with their organization
2007 Prentice Hall
Can values and attitudes change?
Attitude surveys measure employee
attitudes
Companies can change employee
attitudes by changing employee behaviors
Cognitive dissonance
Self-perception theory
2007 Prentice Hall
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
2007 Prentice Hall
Apply what you have learned
World Class Personality: The Rebel
Billionaire
Advice from the Pros
Gain Experience
Can you solve this managers problem?
2007 Prentice Hall
Summary What is your personality
You are unique, a special combination of
personality, cognitive abilities, attitudes
and values
Personality is both genetically and
environmentally determined
Can measure personality with
questionnaires that measure traits
Some tests summarize a variety of traits
into general factors (like the Big Five)
2007 Prentice Hall
Summary How is the Big Five
personality profile used
Has much in common with MBTI
Widely used for such activities as
performance appraisals and team building
Personality traits that are particularly
important in organizations are locus of
control, self-esteem, risk-taking, and
competitiveness
2007 Prentice Hall
Summary What is your emotional style
& importance in organizations
Determined in part by your genetic make-
up and in part by what you have learned
about emotional expression
On the job, emotional competence is a
valued skill
Different organizations have different
norms concerning what emotions are
appropriate to display on the job
2007 Prentice Hall
Summary Cognitive abilities
Includes:
Analytic,
Creative and
Practical abilities
2007 Prentice Hall
Summary Values & Attitudes that
contribute to personal style
Important work values today include job
involvement and work centrality
Behavior of people from other countries
can differ from you on any one of nine key
dimensions
Employers often measure job satisfaction
and organizational commitment