This week we study how personality traits, and individual behavior overall effect the organizational

behavior. Personality theories are formulated to understand self and interpersonal relationships. These
studies help maximize the performance of individuals and team within an organization and are
important for the success of the company.

The behavior of individuals depends on their skills, abilities, personalities, ethics, perceptions attitudes
and values in any environment. The persons behaviour also depend on the situation.

Individuals are unique, based on their individual traits and abilities, they are classified into different
personality types. When the role in the organization are assigned to people with right skill set, they
perform better.

There are five big personality traits: Extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability
and openness to experience.

Core Self-Evaluation (CSE) is an important characteristic which effect people personal growth and
company’s success. People with high CSE have high self-esteem self-efficacy, internal, locus of control
and emotional stability and hence are high achievers. Another important characteristic is Self-
Monitoring. It is based on cues. High self-monitors are flexible, adjust behavior according to the
situations, respond well to organizational culture and feedback. Therefore, they are more likely to get
promoted, accomplish tasks, meet other expectations, offer emotional help, regulate own emotions to
support performance and seek out central positions in social networks.

An individual can have tendency to accentuate negative or positive aspect of oneself, other people, and
the world in general. The role of affect influences job satisfaction, absenteeism, and job satisfaction.

Personality theories have been formulated based on personality traits. The purpose is to select
personnel’s suitable for the organization to ensure optimum performance. One such tool is Myers Briggs
type indicator (MBTI) which is based on Carl Jungs theories. According to these theories, people have
preference of extroversion/introversion, and different styles of gathering data, making decisions and
judgements. People have different ways of doing things and no preference is better than other. People
have combination of preferences, people re-energise through introversion or extroversion, gather
information through sensing or intuiting, they make decision by thinking or feeling, orient to outer world
by judging or perceiving. MBTI is effective in understanding individual differences, identifying learning
and teaching styles, conflict management, understanding management styles and building teams.

Social perception is a process of interpreting information about others. Social perception model
influenced by the characteristics of the perceiver, the target and the situation. Perciever’s characteristics
depend on the familiarities with the target, their attitude/mood, self concept and cognitive structure.
The important characteristics of the target are their physical appearance, verbal communication, non
verbal cues and intensions. Seven common barriers to social perception are selective perception,
stereotype, first impression error, recency effect, contrast effect, projection, and self fulfilling prophecy.

Impression management is the process by which people try to control the impressions other have of
them by self-enhancing techniques and other-enhancing techniques. This is helpful in hiring process and
not in actual performance.
Attribution theory explains how people explain the cause of their own behaviours or that of others. But
there are some attribution biases. One is fundamental attribution error, the tendency to make the
attribution to internal causes when attributing to someone else’s behaviour. Other is Self-serving bias,
the tendency to attribute success to internal causes and failure to external causes. There are
information cues which can help identify if the cause is internal or external. If the same behaviour is
evident in other people then the cause is external. If the same behavior is repeated over time then the
cause is internal. If the similar behaviour was evident in other situations then the cause is internal
otherwise it is external. If poor performance is observed , using the information cues it can be
determined if it is due to internal causes or external causes. And the behaviour in response to these
attributes can be determined.