Organizational Behavior: Personality and Traits

Personality

• Personality constitutes the ways an individual reacts and interacts with others
• Characterized by traits exhibited at high, medium, or low levels

Traits

• Traits are consistent characteristics displayed across situations
• Traits include being shy, aggressive, submissive, ambitious, loyal and timid

Personality Measurement

• Self-reporting surveys involve individuals rating themselves, but are unreliable because of over or under reporting.
• Observer-rated surveys involve others rating an individual; this is more reliable when predicting job success
• The best tests measure stable traits and compare scores against others
• Best tests provide a candidness score, have high reliability, and are valid predictors of job performance

Big Five Personality Types

• These types underlie all personality dimensions
• These types account for most variances in personality and predict behavior in real-life:
  • Conscientiousness relates to reliability and is the best predictor of job performance
  • Emotional Stability relates to handling of stress, it is related to life and job satisfaction and low stress levels
  • Extraversion relates to comfort with relationships and leadership emergence in groups
  • Openness to Experience relates to interest in new things, making leaders effective and able to cope with change
  • Agreeableness relates to deferring to others, doing well in jobs, and higher job satisfaction

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

• A widely used personality instrument that evaluates how people solve problems and make decisions

Validity of MBTI

• Positives: Useful for self-awareness, career guidance, and understanding relating to teammates
• Negatives: Forced choice format, reliability issues, and not related to job performance

Differences Between Person-Job Fit and Person-Organization Fit

• Person-Job Fit: Matching people to specific jobs (initial emphasis)
• Person-Organization Fit: Matching personality/values with the organization to increase job satisfaction and organizational commitment (current emphasis)

Factors Influencing Perception

• Perception influenced by individual characteristics like attitudes, motives, interests, experiences, and expectations
• Target affects perceptions because it is the object being perceived and encompasses novelty, proximity, and similarity
• The time, location, light, heat, or other situational factors can influence perceptions

Attribution Theory

• Judging people based on attributing causes to their behavior
• Internal causes are behaviors a person controls
• External Causes are factors outside a a person's control

Factors of Attribution Theory

• Distinctiveness: Determines if behavior is different on one task vs most others
• Consensus: Determines if others in the same situation behave the same way
• Consistency: Determines if the behavior is stable across time (indicating a pattern)
• Fundamental Attribution Error: Overestimates internal and underestimates external factors when judging others

Perception and Decision Making

• Perceptions are behind thought processes and decision making
• Behavior relies on perceptions of what is real, rather than reality itself
• Those more objective in decision-making are better at avoiding problems with perceptions

Models of Decision Making

• The Rational Model (Normative Model) is how people should behave to maximize the outcome, suggesting one best method.
  • Decision makers should have all the information to identify all options and select the one with the highest utility for the group
• Bounded Rationality involves making a satisfactory decision because of complicated situations
• Intuition involves making decisions based on emotional aspects

Individual Differences and Organizational Constraints in Decision Making

• Individual Differences: Biases and Errors: Overconfidence, anchoring, and confirmation biases
• Organizational Constraints from Situation Strength Theory
  • Strong situations pressure appropriate behavior and weak situations allow more personality expression.
• Clarity involves clearly stated job duties
• Consistency involves job duties leading to outcomes
• Constraints involve there being minimal freedom to act, prescribed decision making
• Consequences involve structured jobs where decisions impact the organization

Early Theories of Motivation

• Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: People have needs in a hierarchy
  • As each need becomes met, the next becomes dominant
  • Separated into higher-order needs (satisfied internally) and lower-order needs (satisfied externally)
• McGregor's Theory X assumes employees have little ambition, dislike work, avoid responsibility, and need supervision
  • McGregor's Theory Y assumes employees enjoy work, seek responsibility, and self-direction.
  • Theory X aligns with lower-order needs; theory Y aligns with higher-order needs
  • McGregor believed Theory Y to be more valid by motivating employees through participation, responsible jobs, and group relations

Contemporary Theories of Motivation

• Self-Determination Theory: People want to feel control over their actions and can have reduced intrinsic interest if extrinsic rewards are coercive

Goal-Setting Theory

• Having intentions to work toward a goal are a source of motivation
• Goals should be specific, challenging, and paired with feedback
• Employees who have the belief in their ability to accomplish something are more motivated
• Influenced by ability, public commitment, and internal locus of control

Expectancy Theory

• The tendency to act depends on the expectation of a given outcome and attractiveness
• Motivation depends on:
  • Expectancy (E) being that effort will lead to performance
  • Instrumentality (I) being that performance will lead to rewards
  • Valence (V) being that rewards are attractive
• Equity Theory: Employees compare what they get from their job (outcomes) to what they put into it (inputs) in comparison to others
  • If the ratio is equal, there is equity

Organizational Justice

• Organizational Justice is concerned with fairness, especially how employees feel authorities treat them:
  • Distributive Justice involves fairness in terms of the amount and distribution of outcomes
  • Procedural Justice involves fairness of the process used to determine the distribution of outcomes
  • Interactional Justice involves provision of truthful explanations and respect

Job Characteristics Model (JCM)

• Skill variety is the degree to which a job requires different activities
• Task identity is the degree to which a job requires completion of a whole task
• Task significance refers to the degree to which the job affects the lives of other people.
  • These three create work that is viewed as important, valuable, and worthwhile.
• Autonomy involves the freedom, independence, and discretion in carrying out work
• Feedback is the degree of feedback coming from performance

Methods for Redesigning Jobs

• Job Rotation: Involves periodically shifting employees from one task to another with similar skill requirements, which can reduce boredom but be disruptive
• Job Enrichment: Expands how the employee is involved in planning, execution, and evaluation with more independence
• Relational Job Design: making jobs more prosocially motivating by connecting employees with the beneficiaries of their work