Personality and

Values
What is Personality?

Personality
The sum total of ways in which an individual reacts
and interacts with others.

Personality Traits
Enduring characteristics Personality
that describe an Determinants
individual’s behavior. • Heredity
• Environment
• Situation

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The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

A personality test that taps four characteristics and
classifies people into 1 of 16 personality types.

Personality Types INTJs

• Extroverted vs. Introverted (E or I) ESTJs

• Sensing vs. Intuitive (S or N)

ENTP
• Thinking vs. Feeling (T or F)
• Judging vs. Perceiving (J or P)

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Myers-
Briggs
Sixteen
Primary
Traits

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The Big Five Model of Personality Dimensions

Extroversion
Sociable, gregarious, and assertive

Agreeableness This dimension refers to an individual’s

propensity to defer to others
Good-natured, cooperative, and trusting.
Conscientiousness
The conscientiousness dimension is a measure of
Reliability. Responsible, dependable, persistent, and organized.

Emotional Stability taps a person’s ability to withstand stress

Calm, self-confident, secure (positive) versus nervous, depressed,
and insecure (negative).
Openness to Experience range of interests and
fascination with novelty
Imaginativeness, artistic, sensitivity, and intellectualism.
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The Big Five Model of Personality Dimensions

Individuals who are dependable, reliable, careful, thorough, able to plan,

organized, hardworking, persistent, and achievement-oriented tend
to have higher job performance in most if not all occupations.
Emotional stability is most strongly related to life satisfaction, job
satisfaction, and low stress levels. This is probably true because high
scorers are more likely to be positive and optimistic and experience
fewer negative emotions.
Individuals who score high on openness to experience are more
creative in science and art than those who score low. Because
creativity is important to leadership, open people are more likely to be
effective leaders, and more comfortable with ambiguity and change

Extraversion is a relatively strong predictor of leadership emergence in

groups; extraverts are more socially dominant, “take charge” sorts of
people, and they are generally more assertive than introverts.

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Major Personality Attributes Influencing OB
 Narcissism
 Locus of control
 Machiavellianism
 Self-esteem
 Self-monitoring
 Risk taking
 Type A personality

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Core Self-Evaluation
People who have positive core self-evaluations like
themselves and see themselves as effective, capable, and
in control of their environment. Those with negative core
self-evaluations tend to dislike themselves, question their
capabilities, and view themselves as powerless over their
environment.

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Narcissism
Narcissists often want to gain the admiration of others
and receive affirmation of their superiority, they tend to
“talk down” to those who threaten them, treating others
as if they were inferior. Narcissists also tend to be
selfish and exploitive and believe others exist for their
benefit. Their bosses rate them as less effective at their
jobs than others, particularly when it comes to helping
people.

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Locus of Control

Locus of Control
The degree to which people believe they
are masters of their own fate.

Internals
Individuals who believe that they
control what happens to them.

Externals
Individuals who believe that
what happens to them is
controlled by outside forces
such as luck or chance.

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 Machiavellianism
Machiavellianism (Mach)
Degree to which an individual is pragmatic, maintains
emotional distance, and believes that ends can justify
means.
High Machs manipulate more, win more, are persuaded less,
and persuade others more than do low Machs. They like their
jobs less, are more stressed by their work, and engage in
more deviant work behaviors.

Conditions Favoring High Machs

• Direct interaction
• Minimal rules and regulations
• Emotions distract for others
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Self-Esteem and Self-Monitoring

Self-Esteem (SE)
Individuals’ degree of liking
or disliking themselves.

Self-Monitoring
A personality trait that measures
an individuals ability to adjust
his or her behavior to external,
situational factors.

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Risk-Taking
 High Risk-taking Managers
– Make quicker decisions
– Use less information to make decisions
– Operate in smaller and more entrepreneurial
organizations
 Low Risk-taking Managers
– Are slower to make decisions
– Require more information before making decisions
– Exist in larger organizations with stable environments
 Risk Propensity
– Aligning managers’ risk-taking propensity to job
requirements should be beneficial to organizations.

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 Personality Types
Type A’s
1. are always moving, walking, and eating rapidly;
2. feel impatient with the rate at which most events take place;
3. strive to think or do two or more things at once;
4. cannot cope with leisure time;
5. are obsessed with numbers, measuring their success in
terms of how many or how much of everything they acquire.

Type B’s
1. never suffer from a sense of time urgency with its
accompanying impatience;
2. feel no need to display or discuss either their achievements
or accomplishments;
3. play for fun and relaxation, rather than to exhibit their
superiority at any cost;
4. can relax without guilt.
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Personality Types

Proactive Personality
Identifies opportunities,
shows initiative, takes
action, and perseveres
until meaningful change
occurs.
Creates positive change
in the environment,
regardless or even in
spite of constraints or
obstacles.

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Values

Values represent basic convictions that “a specific mode of conduct

or end-state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an
opposite or converse mode of conduct or end-state of existence.”

They contain a judgmental element in that they carry an individual’s

ideas as to what is right, good, or desirable. Values have both
content and intensity attributes. The content attribute says a mode of
conduct or end-state of existence is important. The intensity attribute
specifies how important it is. When we rank an individual’s values
in terms of their intensity, we obtain that person’s value system

Are values fluid and flexible?

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Importance of Values

Values lay the foundation for our understanding of

people’s attitudes and motivation and influence our
perceptions. We enter an organization with
preconceived notions of what “ought” and “ought
not” to be.

Would your attitudes and behavior be different if

your values aligned with the organization’s pay
policies? Most likely.

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Terminal VS Instrumental Values

Terminal values , refers to desirable end-

states. These are the goals a person would like
to achieve during his or her lifetime. The other
set, called Instrumental values , refers to
preferable modes of behavior, or means of
achieving the terminal values.
Prosperity and economic success, Freedom, Health and
well-being, World peace, Social recognition, and
Meaning in life
Self-improvement, Autonomy and self-reliance,
Personal discipline, kindness, Ambition, and
Goal-orientation. 4–19
Terminal VS Instrumental Values

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Achieving Person-Job Fit

Personality-Job Fit
Theory (Holland)
Personality Types
Identifies six personality
types and proposes that • Realistic
the fit between personality • Investigative
type and occupational
• Social
environment determines
satisfaction and turnover. • Conventional
• Enterprising
• Artistic

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 Holland’s
Typology of
Personality
and
Congruent
Occupations

E X H I B I T 4–2

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 Relationships
among
Occupational
Personality
Types

Source: Reprinted by special permission of the publisher, Psychological

Assessment Resources, Inc., from Making Vocational Choices, copyright 1973, E X H I B I T 4–3
1985, 1992 by Psychological Assessment Resources, Inc. All rights reserved.

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 Person–organization Fit

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. Using the Big Five terminology, for
instance, we could expect that people high on extraversion fit
well with aggressive and team-oriented cultures, that people
high on agreeableness match up better with a supportive
organizational climate than one focused on aggressiveness,
and that people high on openness to experience fit better in
organizations that emphasize innovation rather than
standardization.

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 International Values

Power distance describes the degree to which people in a country accept

that power in institutions and organizations is distributed unequally. A high
rating on power distance means that large inequalities of power and wealth
exist and are tolerated in the culture, as in a class or caste system that
discourages upward mobility. A low power distance rating characterizes
societies that stress equality and opportunity.

Individualism is the degree to which people prefer to act as individuals

rather than as members of groups and believe in individual rights above all
else. Collectivism emphasizes a tight social framework in which people
expect others in groups of which they are a part to look after them and
protect them.

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International Values
Masculinity versus femininity. Hofstede’s construct of masculinity is the degree to
which the culture favors traditional masculine roles such as achievement, power,
and control, as opposed to viewing men and women as equals.

Uncertainty avoidance. The degree to which people in a country prefer

structured over unstructured situations defines their uncertainty avoidance . In
cultures that score high on uncertainty avoidance, people have an increased
level of anxiety about uncertainty and ambiguity and use laws and controls to
reduce uncertainty. People in cultures low on uncertainty avoidance are more
accepting of ambiguity, are less rule oriented, take more risks, and more readily
accept change.

Long-term versus short-term orientation. This newest addition to Hofstede’s

typology measures a society’s devotion to traditional values. People in a culture
with long-term orientation look to the future and value thrift, persistence, and
tradition. In a short-term orientation , people value the here and now; they
accept change more readily and don’t see commitments as impediments to
change.

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Emotions- Why Emotions Were Ignored in OB
 The “myth of rationality”
– Organizations are not emotion-free.
 Emotions of any kind are disruptive to
organizations.
– Original OB focus was solely on the effects of strong
negative emotions that interfered with individual and
organizational efficiency.

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What Are Emotions?

Affect
A broad range of emotions
that people experience.

Emotions Moods
Intense feelings that are Feelings that tend to be
directed at someone or less intense than
something. emotions and that lack a
contextual stimulus.

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What Are Emotions? (cont’d)

Emotional Labor
A situation in which an employee expresses
organizationally desired emotions during
interpersonal transactions.
Emotional Dissonance
A situation in which an employee
must project one emotion while
simultaneously feeling another.

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Felt versus Displayed Emotions

Felt Emotions
An individual’s actual emotions.

Displayed Emotions
Emotions that are organizationally
required and considered appropriate
in a given job.

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 Emotion Continuum
 The closer any two emotions are to each other on
the continuum, the more likely people are to
confuse them.

E X H I B I T 4–4
Source: Based on R.D. Woodworth, Experimental Psychology (New York: Holt, 1938).
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Emotion Dimensions
 Variety of emotions
– Positive
– Negative
 Intensity of emotions
– Personality
– Job Requirements
 Frequency and duration of emotions
– How often emotions are exhibited.
– How long emotions are displayed.

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Gender and Emotions
 Women
– Can show greater emotional expression.
– Experience emotions more intensely.
– Display emotions more frequently.
– Are more comfortable in expressing emotions.
– Are better at reading others’ emotions.
 Men
– Believe that displaying emotions is inconsistent with the
male image.
– Are innately less able to read and to identify with
others’ emotions.
– Have less need to seek social approval by showing
positive emotions.
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External Constraints on Emotions

Organizational Cultural
Influences Influences

Individual
Emotions

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Affective Events Theory (AET)
 Emotions are negative or positive responses to a work
environment event.
– Personality and mood determine the intensity of the
emotional response.
– Emotions can influence a broad range of work performance
and job satisfaction variables.
 Implications of the theory:
– Individual response reflects emotions and mood cycles.
– Current and past emotions affect job satisfaction.
– Emotional fluctuations create variations in job satisfaction.
– Emotions have only short-term effects on job performance.
– Both negative and positive emotions can distract workers
and reduce job performance.
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 Affective Events Theory (AET)

Source: Based on N.M. Ashkanasy and C.S. Daus, “Emotion in the Workplace: The New E X H I B I T 4–5
Challenge for Managers,” Academy of Management Executive, February 2002, p. 77.
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OB Applications of Understanding Emotions
 Ability and Selection
– Emotions affect employee effectiveness.
 Decision Making
– Emotions are an important part of the decision-making
process in organizations.
 Motivation
– Emotional commitment to work and high motivation
are strongly linked.
 Leadership
– Emotions are important to acceptance of messages
from organizational leaders.

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OB Applications… (cont’d)
 Interpersonal Conflict
– Conflict in the workplace and individual emotions are
strongly intertwined.
 Customer Services
– Emotions affect service quality delivered to customers
which, in turn, affects customer relationships.
 Deviant Workplace Behaviors
– Negative emotions lead to employee deviance (actions
that violate norms and threaten the organization).
• Productivity failures
• Property theft and destruction
• Political actions
• Personal aggression
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Ability and Selection

Emotional
Intelligence
 Emotional Intelligence (EI)
An assortment of
– Self-awareness
noncognitive skills,
– Self-management
capabilities, and
– Self-motivation
competencies that
– Empathy
influence a person’s
ability to succeed in – Social skills
 Research Findings
coping with
environmental – High EI scores, not high
IQ scores, characterize
demands and high performers.
pressures.

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