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)
Environmental
Factors
• Intelligence
• Subjective well-being
(happiness)
• Temperament
• Peer group
influences
• Culture of your
society
©2007 Prentice Hall
How do psychologists determine an
individual’s personality?
• Personality tests measure personality
traits
• Need to be honest in answering questions
• Follow instructions in Table 2.1
• Use Table 2.2 to score your answers
©2007 Prentice Hall
Locus of Control
• Refers to 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 primarily 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
individual’s 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 does the Myers-Briggs Type
Indicator 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 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: how people see themselves in
relation to others
©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
• When presented with stimuli that elicit
basic emotions, all humans react 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
has taught you
how to express
your emotions,
and influenced
you in ways that
make you want
to emote
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 (i.e. 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
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?
• Characteristic aspects of our cognitions our ways of knowing:
Belief: a particular matter that you consider to be
true or false
Values: broad principles 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
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 individual’s life compared with
other activities
• Ethical business values
©2007 Prentice Hall
Hofstede’s five sets of work related
values
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Power distance
Uncertainty avoidance
Individualism versus collectivism
Tough versus nurturing orientation
Long-term versus short-term orientation
©2007 Prentice Hall
Attitudes important to organizations
• Job satisfaction: a person’s positive or
negative evaluation of their job
• Organizational commitment: a person’s
emotional attachment to and identification
with their organization
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Can values and attitudes change?
• Attitude surveys measure employee
attitudes
• Change attitudes by changing behavior
 Cognitive dissonance
 Self-perception theory
©2007 Prentice Hall
Apply what you have learned
• World Class Personality: The Rebel
Billionaire
• Advice from the Pro’s
• Gain Experience
• Can you solve this manager’s 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 makeup 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
©2007 Prentice Hall