Chapter 5 Personality and Values Page
EXPANDED CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Personality
A. What Is Personality?
with others.
2. Measuring personality
a. The most important reason managers need to know how to measure personality is
c. Research indicates our culture influences the way we rate ourselves. People in
individualistic countries trend toward self-enhancement, while people in
self-diminishment.
d. Observer-ratings surveys provide an independent assessment of personality. Here,
a coworker or another observer does the rating.
than self-ratings alone.
f. However, each can tell us something unique about an individual’s behavior, so a
combination of self-reports and observer reports predicts performance better than
any one type of information.
3. Personality determinants
a. Introduction
b. An early argument centered on whether personality was the result of heredity or
environment.
c. Personality appears to be a result of both influences.
d. Heredity refers to those factors that were determined at conception.
e. The heredity approach argues that the ultimate explanation of an individual’s
personality is the molecular structure of the genes, located in the chromosomes.
f. Early work on personality revolved around attempts to identify and label enduring
characteristics.
g. Popular characteristics include shy, aggressive, submissive, lazy, ambitious, loyal,
and timid. These are personality traits.
h. The more consistent the characteristic, the more frequently it occurs, the more
important it is.
II. Personality Frameworks
A. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
Indicator (MBTI).
2. It is a 100-question personality test that asks people how they usually feel or act in
particular situations.
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3. Individuals are classified as:
a. Extroverted or Introverted (E or I).
b. Sensing or Intuitive (S or N).
c. Thinking or Feeling (T or F).
d. Perceiving or Judging (P or J).
4. These classifications are then combined into sixteen personality types. For example:
natural head for business or mechanics.
5. MBTI is widely used in practice although its validity as a measure of personality is
unclear.
B. The Big Five Personality Model
1. An impressive body of research supports that five basic dimensions underlie all other
personality dimensions. The five basic dimensions known as the Big Five Model are:
disagreeable, and antagonistic.
c. Conscientiousness. A measure of reliability. A high conscientious person is
negative scores tend to be nervous, anxious, depressed, and insecure.
e. Openness to experience. The range of interests and fascination with novelty.
familiar.
2. How Do the Big Five Traits Predict Behavior at Work?
performance.
3. Conscientiousness at Work
a. Employees who score higher, for example, in conscientiousness develop higher
levels of job knowledge.
(Exhibit 5-1)
ii. These results attest to the importance of conscientiousness to organizational
success.
iii. Like any trait, conscientiousness has pitfalls.
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performance, safety performance, and OCB.
v. They may also become too focused on their own work to help others in the
organization.
artistically.
b. Although conscientiousness is the Big Five trait most consistently related to job
performance, there are other traits that are related to aspects of performance in
some situations.
one at a time. (Exhibit 5-2)
4. Emotional Stability at Work
demands in the workplace.
5. Extraversion at Work
a. Extraverts tend to perform better in jobs that require significant interpersonal
interaction.
groups.
ii. One downside is that extraverts are more impulsive than introverts and may be
more likely than introverts to lie during job interviews.
b. Openness at Work
changing contexts.
c. Agreeableness at Work
i. Agreeable individuals are better liked than disagreeable people, which
customer service.
ii. They also are more compliant and rule abiding and less likely to get into
accidents as a result.
success (especially earnings).
6. The five personality factors identified in the Big Five model appear in almost all
cross-cultural studies.
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C. The Dark Triad
2. Researchers have found that three other socially undesirable traits, which we all have
Dark Triad.
3. Machiavellianism
gain and use power.
b. An individual high in Machiavellianism is pragmatic, maintains emotional
more.
d. Machiavellianism does not significantly predict overall job performance.
4. Narcissism
c. Often they are selfish and exploitive.
5. Psychopathy
with social norms; willingness to use deceit to obtain desired ends and the
empathic concern, for others.
b. The literature is not consistent about whether psychopathy or other aberrant
personality traits are important to work behavior.
6. Other Traits
a. The Dark Triad is a helpful framework for studying the three dominant dark-side
traits in current personality research, and researchers are exploring other traits as
well.
b. One emerging framework incorporates five additional aberrant compound traits
based on the Big Five.
i. First, antisocial people are indifferent and callous toward others.
ii. Second, borderline people have low self-esteem and high uncertainty.
iii. Third, schizotypal individuals are eccentric and disorganized.
iv. Fourth, obsessive compulsive people are perfectionists and can be stubborn,
yet they attend to details, carry a strong work ethic, and may be motivated by
achievement.
v. Fifth, avoidant individuals feel inadequate and hate criticism.
D. Other Personality Traits Relevant to OB
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1. Core self-evaluations (CSEs)
a. People who have a positive core self-evaluation see themselves as effective,
capable, and in control.
b. People who have a negative core self-evaluation tend to dislike themselves.
c. People with positive core self-evaluations perform better than others because they
set more ambitious goals, are more committed to their goals, and persist longer in
attempting to reach these goals.
2. Self-monitoring
a. This refers to an individual’s ability to adjust his or her behavior to external,
situational factors.
b. Individuals high in self-monitoring show considerable adaptability. They are
highly sensitive to external cues, can behave differently in different situations, and
are capable of presenting striking contradictions between their public persona and
their private self.
c. Low self-monitors cannot disguise themselves in that way. They tend to display
their true dispositions and attitudes in every situation, resulting in a high
behavioral consistency between who they are and what they do.
d. Evidence suggests:
i. High self-monitors tend to pay closer attention to the behavior of others.
ii. High self-monitoring managers tend to be more mobile in their careers and
receive more promotions.
3. Proactive personality
a. Actively taking the initiative to improve their current circumstances while others
sit by passively.
E. Personality, Job Search, and Unemployment
1. A relevant question involves the behaviors of those who are unemployed and looking
for a job: What personality characteristics predict job search behaviors (e.g.,
networking intensity) among the unemployed?
2. Many studies of unemployed job seekers have found that conscientiousness and
the time spent unemployed.
3. It appears that extraversion, conscientiousness, and positive affectivity tend to have a
substantial effect on becoming employed and coping with unemployment (with
negative affectivity and hostility having equivalent negative effects).
4. If you find yourself in a situation where you are unemployed, can you expect your
against your traits?
a. First, it appears as if “approach” and “avoidance” traits (e.g., traits that lead to
approaching challenges head-on or avoiding them) have an effect on job search—
for example, extraversion, conscientiousness, proactive personality, and positive
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tracked over 4 years, significant patterns of change in agreeableness,
conscientiousness, and openness were uncovered.
F. Personality and Situations
a. Increasingly, we are learning that the effect of particular traits on organizational
this works.
2. Situation Strength Theory
a. Situation strength theory proposes that the way personality translates into
behavior depends on the strength of the situation.
b. By situation strength, we mean the degree to which norms, cues, or standards
dictate appropriate behavior.
than in strong ones.
d. Researchers have analyzed situation strength in organizations in terms of four
elements:
i. Clarity, or the degree to which cues about work duties and responsibilities are
available and clear.
responsibilities are compatible with one another.
iii. Constraints, or the extent to which individuals’ freedom to decide or act is
limited by forces outside their control.
iv. Consequences, or the degree to which decisions or actions have important
implications for the organization or its members, clients, supplies, and so on.
These constraints are usually appropriate.
G. Trait Activation Theory
1. Trait activation theory (TAT) predicts that some situations, events, or interventions
“activate” a trait more than others.
a. Exhibit 5-3 shows jobs in which certain Big Five traits are more relevant.
III. Values
A. Introduction
1. Values represent basic convictions.
value system.
5. Values have the tendency to be stable.
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friends, and others.
B. The Importance and Organization of Values
1. Values lay the foundation for the understanding of attitudes and motivation.
2. We enter an organization with preconceived notions of what “ought” and “ought not”
be.
others.
3. Values influence attitudes and behavior.
C. Terminal Versus Instrumental Values
1. How can we organize values?
2. Milton Rokeach separates them into:
achieving the terminal values.
D. Generational Values
1. Contemporary work cohorts
i. Exhibit 5-4 segments employees by the era during which they entered the
workforce.
correlate closely with employee age.
(a) Boomers (Baby Boomers)—entered the workforce during the 1960s
through the mid-1980s.
(b) Xers—entered the workforce beginning in the mid-1980s.
(c) The most recent entrants to the workforce are the Millennials.
classifications lack solid research support.
3. Generational classifications may help us understand our own and other generations
better, but we must also appreciate their limits.
IV. Linking an Individual’s Personality and Values to the Workplace
A. The Person-Job Fit
and artistic. (Exhibit 5-5)
a. Each one of the six personality types has a congruent occupational environment.
b. Vocational Preference Inventory questionnaire contains 160 occupational titles.
Respondents indicate which of these occupations they like or dislike; their
answers are used to form personality profiles.
personality and occupation are in agreement.
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i. The key point of this model is that people in jobs congruent with their
people in incongruent jobs.
B. Person-Organization Fit
1. The person-organization fit essentially argues that people are attracted to and selected
by organizations that match their values, and they leave organizations that are not
compatible with their personalities.
the organization’s culture.
4. This match predicts job satisfaction, commitment to the organization, and low
turnover.
C. Other Dimensions of Fit
interactions significantly affect work outcomes.
b. Person-supervisor fit has become an important area of research since poor fit in
this dimension can lead to lower job satisfaction and reduced performance.
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