Personality & Perception

• Personality is the sum total of ways in which an individual reacts to

and interacts with others.
• It is long-standing traits and patterns that propel individuals to
consistently think, feel, and behave in specific ways.
• Personality assessments have been increasingly used in diverse
organizational settings.
• Personality tests are useful in hiring decisions and help managers
forecast who is best for a job. Self-report methods and observers
rating is often used to assess personality.
• Personality involves both inborn traits and the development of
cognitive and behavioral patterns that influence how we think and
act.
• Temperament is a key part of personality that is determined by
inherited traits.
• Character is an aspect of personality influenced by experience and
social learning that continues to grow and change throughout life.
How Personality Influences Behavior
• Sigmund Freud not only theorized about how personality developed over the course of childhood,
but he also developed a framework for how overall personality is structured.
• According to Freud, the basic driving force of personality and behavior is known as the libido. This
libidinal energy fuels the three components that make up personality: the id, the ego, and the
superego.5
• The id is the aspect of personality present at birth. It is the most primal part of the personality and
drives people to fulfill their most basic needs and urges.
• The ego is the aspect of personality charged with controlling the urges of the id and forcing it to
behave in realistic ways.
• The superego is the final aspect of personality to develop and contains all of the ideals, morals, and
values imbued by our parents and culture.
• According to Freud, these three elements of personality work together to create complex human
behaviors. The superego attempts to make the ego behave according to these ideals. The ego must
then moderate between the primal needs of the id, the idealistic standards of the superego, and
reality.
Personality Frameworks
Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
• Extraverted (E) versus Introverted (I). Extraverted individuals are outgoing,
sociable, and assertive. Introverts are quiet and shy.
• Sensing (S) versus Intuitive (N). Sensing types are practical and prefer
routine and order, and they focus on details. Intuitives rely on unconscious
processes and look at the “big picture.”
• Thinking (T) versus Feeling (F). Thinking types use reason and logic to
handle problems. Feeling types rely on their personal values and e motions.
• Judging (J) versus Perceiving (P). Judging types want control and prefer
order and structure. Perceiving types are flexible and spontaneous.
• Big five personality Model
• Conscientiousness. The conscientiousness dimension is a measure of reliability. A highly conscientious
person is responsible, organized, dependable, and persistent. Those who score low on this dimension are
easily distracted, disorganized, and unreliable.
• Neuroticism or Emotional stability. The emotional stability dimension taps a person’s ability to withstand
stress. People with emotional stability tend to be calm, self-confident, and secure. High scorers are more
likely to be positive and optimistic and experience fewer negative emotions; they are generally happier
than low scorers. Emotional stability is sometimes discussed as its converse, neuroticism. Low scorers
(those with high neuroticism) are hyper-vigilant and vulnerable to the physical and psychological effects of
stress. Those with high neuroticism tend to be nervous, anxious, depressed, and insecure.
• Extraversion. The extraversion dimension captures our comfort level with relationships. Extraverts tend to
be gregarious, assertive, and sociable. They are generally happier and are often ambitious.20 They
experience more positive emotions than do introverts, and they more freely express these feelings. On
the other hand, introverts (low extraversion) tend to be more thoughtful, reserved, timid, and quiet.
• Openness to experience. The openness to experience dimension addresses the range of interests and
fascination with novelty. Open people are creative, curious, and artistically sensitive. Those at the low end
of the category are conventional and find comfort in the familiar.
• Agreeableness. The agreeableness dimension refers to an individual’s propensity to defer to others.
Agreeable people are cooperative, warm, and trusting. You might expect agreeable people to be happier
than disagreeable people. They are, but only slightly. When people choose organizational team members,
agreeable individuals are usually their first choice. In contrast, people who score low on agreeableness are
cold and antagonistic.
Model of How Big five traits Influence OB criteria
Some other Theories related to personality
• Situation Strength Theory proposes that the way personality translates into behavior
depends on the strength of the situation. By situation strength, we mean the degree to
which norms, cues, or standards dictate appropriate behavior. Strong situations show us
what the right behavior is, pressure us to exhibit it, and discourage the wrong behavior.
• In weak situations, conversely, “anything goes,” and thus we are freer to express our
personality in behavior. Thus, personality traits better predict behavior in weak situations
than in strong ones.
• Trait Activation Theory: A theory that predicts that some situations, events, or
interventions “activate” a trait more than others.
• Using TAT, we can foresee which jobs suit certain personalities. For example, a commission-
based compensation plan would likely activate individual differences because extraverts are
more reward-sensitive, than, say, open people. Conversely, in jobs that encourage creativity,
differences in openness may better predict desired behavior than differences in
extraversion.
• Personality disorders are mental health conditions characterized by
inflexible and maladaptive patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving
that cause significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or
other important areas of functioning.
• While not everyone with a personality disorder will exhibit problematic
behavior in the workplace, certain traits associated with these disorders
can manifest in ways that impact work relationships, performance, and
overall productivity.
• Paranoid, Schizoid, Schizotypal, Antisocial, Borderline, Histrionic,
Narcissistic, Avoidant, Dependent, Obsessive Compulsive are some
commonly found PDs at workplace. (See the Pdf H/o for details).
Perception
• Perception is a process by which we organize and
interpret sensory impressions in order to give
meaning to our environment. What we perceive
can be substantially different from objective
reality. For example, all employees in a firm may
view it as a great place to work—favorable
working conditions, interesting job assignments,
good pay, excellent benefits, understanding and
responsible management—but, as most of us
know, it’s very unusual to find agreement
universal opinion.
• A number of factors shape and sometimes distort
perception. These factors can reside in the
perceiver, the object or target being perceived, or
the situation in which the perception is made
Attribution Theory
• Attribution theory tries to explain the ways we judge people differently,
depending on the meaning we attribute to a behavior. For instance, consider
what you think when people smile at you. Do you think they are cooperative,
exploitative, or competitive? We assign meaning to smiles and other
expressions in many different ways. Attribution theory suggests that when we
observe an individual’s behavior, we attempt to determine whether it was
internally or externally caused.
• Internally caused behaviors are those an observer believes to be under the
personal behavioral control of another individual. Externally caused behavior is
what we imagine the situation forced the individual to do.
• If an employee is late for work, you might attribute that to his overnight partying and
subsequent oversleeping. This is an internal attribution. But if you attribute his lateness
to a traffic snarl, you are making an external attribution.
Common Shortcuts in Judging others
• Selective Perception The tendency to selectively interpret what one sees on the
basis of one’s interests, background, experience, and attitudes.
• Contrast Effect: Evaluation of a person’s characteristics that is affected by
comparisons with other people recently encountered who rank higher or lower on
the same characteristics.
• Halo effect When we draw an impression about an individual on the basis of a single
characteristic, such as intelligence, sociability, or appearance, a halo effect is
operating.
• Stereotyping When we judge someone on the basis of our perception of the group to
which he or she belongs, we are stereotyping. One problem with stereotypes is that
they are widespread generalizations, though they may not contain a shred of truth
when applied to a particular person or situation. We have to monitor ourselves to
make sure we’re not unfairly applying a stereotype in our evaluations and decisions.
Values
• Values defined in Organizational Behavior as the collective conceptions of what is considered
good, desirable, and proper or bad, undesirable, and improper in a culture.
• Research indicates that they are shaped early in life and show stability over the course of a
lifetime.
• Values lay the foundation for understanding attitudes and motivation, and they influence our
perceptions. We enter an organization with preconceived notions of what “ought” and “ought
not” to be. These notions contain our interpretations of right and wrong and our preferences for
certain behaviors or outcomes.
• . There are three types of values
• Character Values universal values that you need to exist as a good human being like honesty, loyalty, respect
and equality etc.
• Work values are values that help you find what you want in a job and give you job satisfaction like
achievement, stability, team orientation etc.
• Personal values are values that help you define what you want out of life and will assist you in being happy
and fulfilled like Health, Social acceptance, Discipline etc.
• Person–organization fit essentially means people are attracted to and selected by organizations
that match their values, and they leave organizations that are not compatible with their
personalities