Chapter :09 Personality and Values

What Is Personality ?Exercise: Define personality, describe how it is measured, and explain
the factors that determine an individual’s personality.

 Personality as the sum total of ways in which an individual reacts to and interacts
with others.
 Measuring Personality The most important reason managers need to know how to
measure personality is that research has shown personality tests are useful in hiring
decisions and help managers forecast who is best for a job.

 The most common means of measuring personality is through self-report surveys, with
which individuals evaluate themselves on a series of factors, such as “I worry a lot about
the future.”

 One weakness is that the respondent might lie or practice impression management to
create a good impression.

 When people know their personality scores are going to be used for hiring decisions,
they rate themselves as about half a standard deviation more conscientious and
emotionally stable than if they are taking the test just to learn more about themselves.

 Another problem is accuracy. A perfectly good candidate could have been in a bad
mood
when taking the survey, and that will make the scores less accurate.

 Observer-ratings surveys provide an independent assessment of personality. Here,

a co-worker or another observer does the rating.

 A combination of self-report and observer-reports predicts performance better than any

one type of information.

 The implication is clear: use both observer ratings and self-report ratings of personality
when making important employment decisions.

 Personality Determinants An early debate in personality research centered on whether

an individual’s personality was the result of heredity or of environment. It appears to be
a result of both. However, it might surprise you that research tends to support the importance
of heredity over the environment.
Heredity refers to factors determined at conception. Physical stature, facial attractiveness,
gender, temperament, muscle composition and reflexes, energy level, and biological rhythms
are generally considered to be either completely or substantially influenced by who your
parents are—that is, by their biological, physiological, and inherent psychological makeup.

 The heredity approach argues that the ultimate explanation of an individual’s

personality is the molecular structure of the genes, located in the chromosomes.

 Researchers in many different countries have studied thousands of sets of identical

twins who were separated at birth and raised separately.

 If heredity played little or no part in determining personality, you would expect to find
few similarities between the separated twins.

 But twins raised apart have much in common, and a significant part of the behavioral
similarity between them turns out to be associated with genetic factors.

 Early work on the structure of personality tried to identify and label enduring
characteristics that describe an individual’s behavior, including shy, aggressive,
submissive, lazy, ambitious, loyal, and timid.

 When someone exhibits these characteristics in a large number of situations, we call

them personality traits of that person.

The Big 5 Personality Factor

 Big Five Model—that five basic dimensions underlie all others and encompass most of
the significant variation in human personality.

 Moreover, test scores of these traits do a very good job of predicting how people behave
in a variety of real-life situations.

 The following are the Big Five factors:

 Extraversion: The extraversion dimension captures our comfort level with relationships.
Extraverts tend to be gregarious, assertive, and sociable.

 Introverts tend to be reserved, timid, and quiet.

 Agreeableness: The agreeableness dimension refers to an individual’s propensity to

defer to others.

 Highly agreeable people are cooperative, warm, and trusting. People who score low on
agreeableness are cold, disagreeable, and antagonistic.
 Conscientiousness. The conscientiousness dimension is a measure of reliability. A highly
conscientious person is responsible, organized, dependable, and persistent.

 Those who score low on this dimension are easily distracted, disorganized, and
unreliable.

 Emotional stability. The emotional stability dimension taps a person’s ability to

withstand stress.

 People with positive emotional stability tend to be calm, self-confident, and secure.
Those with high negative scores tend to be nervous, anxious, depressed, and insecure.

 Openness to experience. The openness to experience dimension addresses range of

interests and fascination with novelty.

 Extremely open people are creative, curious, and artistically sensitive.

 Those at the other end of the category are conventional and find comfort in the familiar.

 How Do the Big Five Traits Predict Behavior at Work? Research has found
relationships between these personality dimensions and job performance.

 In addition, employees who score higher in conscientiousness develop higher levels of

job
knowledge, probably because highly conscientious people learn more.

 Higher levels of job knowledge then contribute to higher levels of job performance.

 Although conscientiousness is most consistently related to job performance, the other Big
Five traits are also related to aspects of performance and have other implications for work
and for life.
 Of the Big Five traits, emotional stability is most strongly related to life satisfaction, job
satisfaction, and low stress levels.

 This is probably true because high scorers are more likely to be positive and optimistic
and experience fewer negative emotions.

 They are happier than those who score low. People low on emotional stability are
hypervigilant (looking for problems or impending signs of danger) and are especially
vulnerable to the physical and psychological effects of stress.

 Extraverts tend to be happier in their jobs and in their lives as a whole. They experience
more positive emotions than do introverts, and they more freely express these feelings.

 They also tend to perform better in jobs that require significant interpersonal interaction,
perhaps because they have more social skills—they usually have more friends and spend
more time in social situations than introverts.
Finally, extraversion is a relatively strong predictor of leadership emergence in groups;
extraverts are more socially dominant, “take charge” sorts of people, and they are generally more
assertive than introverts

 Individuals who score high on openness to experience are more creative in science and
art than those who score low.

 Because creativity is important to leadership, open people are more likely to be effective
leaders, and more comfortable with ambiguity and change.

 They cope better with organizational change and are more adaptable in changing
contexts.

 You might expect agreeable people to be happier than disagreeable people. When people
choose romantic partners, friends, or organizational team members, agreeable individuals
are usually their first choice.

 Agreeable individuals are better liked than disagreeable people, which explains why they
tend to do better in interpersonally oriented jobs such as customer service.

 They also are more compliant and rule abiding and less likely to get into accidents as a
result.

 People who are agreeable are more satisfied in their jobs and contribute to organizational
performance by engaging in citizenship behavior.

 Exercise: Identify the key traits in the Big Five personality model.

 Although the Big Five traits have proven highly relevant to OB, they don’t exhaust the
range of traits that can describe someone’s personality.

 Now we’ll look at other, more specific, attributes that are powerful predictors of behavior
in organizations.

 The first relates to our core self-evaluation. The others are Machiavellianism, narcissism,
self-monitoring, propensity for risk taking, proactive personality, and other-orientation.

 Core Self-Evaluation People who have positive core self-evaluations like themselves
and see themselves as effective, capable, and in control of their environment.

 Those with negative core self-evaluations tend to dislike themselves, question their
capabilities, and view themselves as powerless over their environment.

 But what about job performance? People with positive core self-evaluations perform
better than others because they set more ambitious goals, are more committed to their
goals, and persist longer in attempting to reach these goals.