Personality

9 and Cultural
Values

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9-1
Copyright © 2011 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
McGraw-Hill/Irwin Copyright © 2011 by the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
 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? Slide
9-2
 Personality and Cultural Values
 Personality refers to the structures and
propensities inside a person that explain his or
her characteristic patterns of thought,
emotion, and behavior.
Personality captures what people are like.
 Cultural values, defined as shared beliefs
about desirable end states or modes of
conduct in a given culture, influence the
development of a person’s personality traits.
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9-3
 Personality Determinants
 How does personality develop?
 Nature
 Studies of identical twins reared apart and studies of
personality stability over time suggest that between 35
and 45 percent of the variation in personality is genetic.
 Nurture
 Surrounding
 Experiences

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Trait Adjectives Associated with the Big
Figure 9-1
Five

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 Personality and Job Performance
 Conscientious employees prioritize accomplishment
striving, which reflects a strong desire to accomplish
task-related goals as a means of expressing personality.
Conscientiousness has the biggest influence on job performance.
 Neurotic people are more likely to appraise day-to-day
situations as stressful and also are less likely to believe
they can cope with the stressors that they experience.
 Neurotic people tend to hold an external locus of control,
meaning that they believe that the events that occur around
them are driven by luck, chance, or fate.

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 External and Internal Locus of Control
Table 9-2

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9-7
 Personality and Job Performance
 Agreeable people focus on “getting along,” not
necessarily “getting ahead.”
Prioritize communion striving, which reflects a
strong desire to obtain acceptance in personal
relationships as a means of expressing personality.
Beneficial in some positions but detrimental in others.
 Extraverts prioritize status striving, which
reflects a strong desire to obtain power and
influence within a social structure as a means of
expressing personality.
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9-8
 Personality and Job Performance
 Openness to experience is more likely to be
valuable in jobs that require high levels of
creative performance.
 Highly open individuals are more likely to migrate
into artistic and scientific fields.

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9-9
Personality and Job Outcomes

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9-10
Changes in Big Five Dimensions over the
Life Span
Figure 9-2

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9-11
Effects of Personality on Performance and
Figure 9-8 Commitment

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9-12
 Personality Tests
 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.
 What about faking to get the job?
Because everyone fakes to some degree, correlations
with outcomes like theft or other counterproductive
behaviors are relatively unaffected.

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9-13
 Limitations of Personality
 Organizations as strong situations
Behaviors and attitudes in organizations are highly
institutionalized and governed by “common
understandings” of what constitutes appropriate
behavior
Attitudes and behaviors are significantly affected
by reward structures, job design, socialization,
social networks

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9-14
 Limitations of Personality
 Performance is not only individual
Team minimum agreeableness, team mean
conscientiousness, openness to experience predict
team performance
 Usage of psychological tests requires extensive
psychometric know-how
Need to validate in every setting
Need norms to establish cut-offs
 Relying too much on person factors can
“distort” some managers’ initiatives regarding
organizational improvements Slide
9-15
 Cultural Values
 Culture is defined as the shared values,
beliefs, motives, identities, and
interpretations that result from common
experiences of members of a society and are
transmitted across generations.

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9-16
 Cultural Values
 To gain insight to underlying assumptions of
mainstream management theories

 http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/03/06/
iyengar.fish.freedom/index.html?
iref=obnetwork

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9-17
 Four Dimensions of
National Culture (Hofstede, 1980)

 Individualism-Collectivism
 Large or Small Power Distance
 Strong or Weak Uncertainty Avoidance
 Masculinity versus Femininity

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9-18

 Individualists base identity on
what they own and their
experiences
• Personal goals have priority
• Personal preferences, needs,
traits determine social
behaviors
• Emphasis is on rational analyses
of advantages and
disadvantages of maintaining a
relationship
Individualism
Collectivism
 Identity among collectivists is
defined by relationships and group
membership
• Ingroup goals have priority
• Norms, obligations, duties
determine social behaviors
• Emphasis on maintaining
relationships, even when they are
disadvantageous
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9-19
 Power Distance

SMALL LARGE
 All should have equal rights
 Powerful people try to look less
 Power holders are entitled
powerful to privileges
 Senior people neither respected nor
feared  Status symbols accepted
 Delegation  Senior people respected
and feared
 Centralization
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Slide
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 Masculinity vs. Femininity

 Live in order to work  Work in order to live

 More achievement
oriented
 Performance society
 Maximized social sex role
division
 More quality of life
oriented
 Welfare society
 Relatively small social
sex role division

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 Uncertainty Avoidance
WEAK STRONG
 High tolerance for  Low tolerance for
ambiguity ambiguity
 Less risk averse  Risk averse
 More comfortable in  Structure seeking
unstructured situations

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Slide
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 Cultural Values, Cont’d
 Project GLOBE (Global Leadership and
Organizational Behavior Effectiveness) is a
collection of 170 researchers from 62 cultures
who have studied 17,300 managers in 951
organizations since 1991.
 Main purpose is to examine the impact of culture
on the effectiveness of various leader attributes,
behaviors, and practices.

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 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.
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9-26
 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.

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Cultural Clusters

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Turkish Culture Scores in Perspective

7
6
5
Turkey
4
USA
3
NL
2
1
0

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Turkish Culture Scores in Perspective
7
6
5
4 China
3 Turkey
2
1
0

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 0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Uncertainty
avoidance

Future
orientation

Power
distance

Institutional
collectivism

Hum ane
orientation

Perform ance
orientation

Groupand
fam ily
collectivism

G ender
egalitarianism

Assertiveness
Turkish Culture Scores in Principle

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9-31
As is
Should be
 Conceptual Representations

Spouse
Friend Friend Spouse

Self
Self Colleague
Colleague Friend
Family
Friend
Family

Individualist Self Collectivist Self Slide

9-32

Source: Markus & Kitayama, 1991

 Collectivism
 Relationships are not means for realizing
individual goals but are often ends in and of
themselves.
 Maintaining a connection to others means
being constantly aware of others and focusing
on their needs, desires, goals.
 Interdependent selves do not attend to all
others but to ingroup members.

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 Ingroup vs. Outgroup
 Ingroup: Others with whom one shares a
common fate, such as family members, or
members of the same lasting social group, such
as the work group.
Outgroup members are typically treated quite
differently and are unlikely to experience the
advantages of interdependence.

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 Ingroups-Outgroups and
Performance (Earley, 1993)
 An experiment with a sample of American,
Israeli and Chinese managers
 Every manager was randomly assigned to
working with an ingroup, and outgroup or
working alone condition
Ingroup (Outgroup): Working with others from the
same (different) region and background

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 Ingroups-Outgroups and
Performance (Earley, 1993)
80
70
60
50
Performance

Individualism
40
Collectivism
30
20
10
0
Alone Outgroup Ingroup
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9-36
 Possible Outcomes of
Kin Collectivism

 Lack of trust for and cooperation with nonkin

 Average number of workers in Hong Kong [manufacturing
industry] = 19
 Nepotism and paternalism
 “Personalized” HR practices
 Abuse and neglect
 Using organizational resources and time on work for
personal [family] business

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 Consequences for Cognition

 Collectivists
 more attentive to understanding the social surrounding
 more context-specific knowledge of self and the other
 less likely to make the fundamental attribution error
 less creative: Cognitive capacity used up by monitoring
may lower performance on tasks requiring individual
assertion like creativity

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 Consequences for Emotion
 Collectivists
 may inhibit the experience or at
least the expression of some
ego-focused emotions (e.g.,
anger, frustration, pride), but
have a heightened capacity for
the experience and expression
of other-focused emotions (e.g.,
shame, sympathy)
 may view emotional expression
as a public instrumental action
that may or may not be related
directly to inner feelings.
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 Consequences for Motivation
 Achievement motivation
Individualists: Reaching some internalized standard of
excellence
Collectivists: Fulfilling the expectations of significant
others
 Self-esteem
Collectivists: Enhanced through concern for others and
self-control  modesty bias
Individualists: Enhanced through being unique,
expressing one’s self  self-serving bias
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 I and C at the Individual Level
 In every culture we get the full distribution of I
and C
In every culture, there are people who believe, feel
and act very much like collectivists do around the
world.
There are also people who believe feel, and act like
individualists do around the world.
Age  Collectivism 
Social class  Individualism 
Travel  Individualism 
Education  Individualism 
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 One Last Note of Caution
Ethnocentrism is defined as a
propensity to view one’s own cultural
values as “right” and those of other
cultures as “wrong.”

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How Can We Describe What Employees
Are Like?
Figure 9-7

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