Organizational Behavior: An Introduction to Your Life in Organizations

1. Organizational Behavior:An Introduction to Your Life in Organizations Chapter 2 Your Personality and Style ©2007 Prentice Hall

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. The Big Five personality factors • Extraversion and energy (sometimes referred to as “sociability,” or “surgency”) versus introversion and passivity • Adventurous versus traditional (also referred to as “openness versus closedness”) • Agreeableness versus tough-mindedness • Conscientiousness versus undirectedness • Emotionality (also called neuroticism) versus stability ©2007 Prentice Hall

10. Use Table 2.3 to determine your personality profile Summarize your profile using Table 2.4 ©2007 Prentice Hall

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. Your family life has taught you how to express your emotions, and influenced you in ways that make you want to emote Environmental determinants of emotions Different societies have different emotion cultures, which influence your personal emotional style ©2007 Prentice Hall

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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

21. 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

22. Hofstede’s five sets of work related values • Power distance • Uncertainty avoidance • Individualism versus collectivism • Tough versus nurturing orientation • Long-term versus short-term orientation ©2007 Prentice Hall

23. 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 ©2007 Prentice Hall

24. Can values and attitudes change? • Attitude surveys measure employee attitudes • Change attitudes by changing behavior • Cognitive dissonance • Self-perception theory ©2007 Prentice Hall

25. 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

26. 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

27. 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

28. 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

29. Summary – Cognitive abilities • Includes: • Analytic, • Creative and • Practical abilities ©2007 Prentice Hall

30. 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