Personality and Cultural Values

1. Personality and Cultural Values 9

2. Learning Goals • What is personality? What are cultural values? • What are the “Big Five?” • Is personality driven by nature or by nurture? • What taxonomies can be used to describe personality, other than the Big Five? • What taxonomies can be used to describe cultural values? • How does personality affect job performance and organizational commitment? • Are personality tests useful tools for organizational hiring?

3. Personality and Cultural Values Personality • The structures and propensities that explain a person’s characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior • Captures what people are like Traits • Recurring regularities or trends in people’s responses to their environment Cultural values • Shared beliefs about desirable end states or modes of conduct in a given culture • Influence the development of a person’s personality traits

4. Personality Determinants • How does personality develop? • Nature • Study of identical twins • Genes • Nurture • Surrounding • Experiences

5. The Big Five Personality Traits • Conscientiousness • Dependable • Organized • Reliable • Ambitious • Hardworking • Persevering • Biggest influence on job performance • Prioritize accomplishment striving • Strong desire to accomplish task-related goals as a means of expressing personality

6. The Big Five Personality Traits, cont’d • Agreeableness • Warm • Kind • Cooperative • Sympathetic • Helpful • Courteous • Beneficial in some positions, detrimental in others • Prioritize communion striving • Strong desire to obtain acceptance in personal relationships as a means of expressing personality • Focus on “getting along,” not “getting ahead”

7. The Big Five Personality Traits, cont’d • Extraversion • Talkative • Sociable • Passionate • Assertive • Bold • Dominant • Easiest to judge in zero acquaintancesituations • Prioritize status striving • Strong desire to obtain power and influence within a social structure as a means of expressing personality • Tend to be high in positive affectivity — a dispositional tendency to experience pleasant, engaging moods

8. The Big Five Personality Traits, cont’d • Neuroticism • Nervous • Moody • Emotional • Insecure • Jealous • Synonymous with negative affectivity • Differential exposureto stressors: neurotic people are more likely to appraise day-to-day situations as stressful • Differential reactivityto stressors: neurotic people are less likely to believe they can cope with the stressors they experience

9. The Big Five Personality Traits, cont’d Neuroticism, continued • Strongly related to locus of control • Tend to hold an external locus of control • Believe that the events that occur around them are driven by luck, chance, or fate. • Less neurotic people tend to hold an internal locus of control • Believe that their own behavior dictates events.

10. The Big Five Personality Traits, cont’d • Openness to experience • Curious • Imaginative • Creative • Complex • Refined • Sophisticated • Valuable in jobs that require high levels of creative performance • Job holders need to be able to generate novel and useful ideas and solutions • Highly open individuals are more likely to migrate into artistic and scientific fields

11. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator • Extraversion - energized by people and social interactions vs. • Introversion - energized by private time and reflection • Sensing - preferring clear and concrete facts and data vs. • Intuition - preferring hunches and speculations based on theory and imagination

12. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator • Thinking - approaching decisions with logic and critical analysis vs. • Feeling - approaching decisions with an emphasis on others’ needs and feelings • Judging - approaching tasks by planning and setting goals vs. • Perceiving - preferring to have flexibility and spontaneity when performing tasks

13. Holland’s RIASEC Model Six different personality types summarize interests • Realistic: Enjoy practical, hands-on, real-world tasks • Investigative: Enjoy abstract, analytical, theory-oriented tasks • Artistic: Enjoy entertaining and fascinating others using imagination • Social: Enjoy helping, serving, or assisting others • Enterprising: Enjoy persuading, leading, or outperforming others • Conventional: Enjoy organizing, counting, or regulating people or things

14. Cultural Values • Culture • The values, beliefs, motives, identity, and interpretations shared by members of a society • Result from common experiences • Transmitted across generations • Employees working in different countries tend to prioritize different values • Values cluster into several distinct dimensions

15. Table 9-3 Hofstede’s Dimensions of Cultural Values

16. Table 9-3 Hofstede’s Dimensions of Cultural Values, cont’d

17. Cultural Values, cont’d Project GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness) • Collection of 170 researchers from 62 cultures • Studied 17,300 managers in 951 organizations since 1991 • Examine the impact of culture on the effectiveness of various leader attributes, behaviors, and practices

18. Project GLOBE • Power Distance and Uncertainty Avoidance • Institutional Collectivism • Formalized practices encourage collective action and collective distribution of resources • In-group Collectivism • Individuals express pride and loyalty to specific in-groups • Gender Egalitarianism • The culture promotes gender equality and minimizes role differences between men and women • Assertiveness • The culture values assertiveness, confrontation, and aggressiveness in social relationships

19. Project GLOBE, cont’d • Future Orientation • The culture engages in planning and investment in the future while delaying individual or collective gratification • Performance Orientation • The culture encourages and rewards members for excellence and performance improvements. • Humane Orientation • The culture encourages and rewards members for being generous, caring, kind, fair, and altruistic. Ethnocentrismis defined as a propensity to view one’s own cultural values as “right” and those of other cultures as “wrong.”

20. Importance of Personality and Cultural Values • Conscientiousness affects job performance • Key driver of typical performance, reflecting performance in the routine conditions that surround daily job tasks • More likely to engage in citizenship behaviors • Tend to be more committed to their organization • An employee’s ability is a key driver of maximum performance, reflecting performance in brief, special circumstances that demand a person’s best effort

21. Importance of Personality and Cultural Values, cont’d • Situational strength • “Strong situations” have clear behavioral expectations, incentives, or instructions • “Weak situations” lack those cues • Differences between individuals are less important in strong situations • Trait activation • Some situations provide cues that trigger the expression of a given trait

22. Application: Personality Tests Integrity testsfocus specifically on a predisposition to engage in theft and other deviant behaviors • More strongly related to job performance than conscientiousness scores • Clear purpose testsask applicants about their attitudes toward dishonesty • Beliefs about the frequency of dishonesty • Endorsements of common rationalizations • Desire to punish dishonesty • Confessions of past dishonesty • Veiled purpose tests assess more general personality traits that are associated with dishonest acts

23. Personality Tests, cont’d • Research suggests that almost everyone engages in some form offaking—exaggerating your responses to a personality test in a socially desirable fashion • Because everyone fakes to some degree, correlations with outcomes like theft or other counterproductive behaviors are relatively unaffected • Experts on personnel selection agree that personality and integrity tests are among the most useful tools for hiring—more useful even than the typical version of the employment interview