PERSONALITY, TEMPERMENT, TRAIT & EMOTIONS

 

Implications in the Corporate World

 

Perception

Ψ      Individuals behave based not on the way their external environment actually is but, rather, on what they see or believe it to be

Ψ      Evidence suggests that what individuals perceive from their work situation will influence their productivity more than will the situation itself

Ψ      Absenteeism, turnover, and job satisfaction are also reactions to the individual’s perceptions

 

Personality

Ψ      Personality helps us predict behaviour

Ψ      Personality can help match people to jobs, to some extent at least

 

Emotions

Ψ      Can hinder performance, especially negative emotions

Ψ      Can also enhance performance

 

1) Personality

 

•         What is Personality?

–        Distinctive and relatively stable pattern of behaviours, thoughts, motives, and emotions that characterizes an individual throughout life.

•         Personality Determinants

–        Heredity

–        Environment

–        Situation

•         Personality Traits

–        Enduring characteristics that describe an individual’s behaviour

•         The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

•         The Big Five Model

•         Enneagram

•         Attribution Theory

–        When individuals observe behaviour, they attempt to determine whether it is internally or externally caused.

•         Fundamental Attribution Error

–        The tendency to underestimate the influence of external factors and overestimate the influence of internal factors when making judgments about the behaviour of others.

•         Self-Serving Bias

–        The tendency for individuals to attribute their own successes to internal factors while putting the blame for failures on external factors.

 

Type A and Type B Personalities

 

•         Type A Personality

–        Always moving, walking, and eating rapidly.

–        Feel impatient with the rate at which most events take place.

–        Strive to think or do two or more things at once.

–        Cannot cope with leisure time.

–        Are obsessed with numbers, measuring their success in terms of how many or how much of everything they acquire.

•         Type B Personality

–        Never suffer from a sense of time urgency with its accompanying impatience.

–        Feel no need to display or discuss either their achievements or accomplishments unless such exposure is demanded by the situation.

–        Play for fun and relaxation, rather than to exhibit their superiority at any cost.

–        Can relax without guilt.

 

2) Temperament

 

Temperament is what we call that part of our personalities or characters that is built--in to us genetically.  Consequentially, although there is always a degree of flexibility allowed, to a large extent we "are" our temperaments for our whole lives. 

 

Nearly everyone we know of accepts two dimensions of personality as established before birth, probably genetically:

Ψ      Emotional stability (AKA neuroticism...) and

Ψ      Extraversion-introversion (AKA sociability, surgency...).

 

Three more seem to have popular approval:

Ψ      Conscientiousness (AKA judging-perceiving...),

Ψ      Agreeableness (AKA warmth, feeling-thinking...), and

Ψ      Openness (AKA culture, intuiting-sensing...).

 

3) Trait

n      A characteristic of an individual, describing a habitual way of behaving, thinking, and feeling.

 

Traits = Broad dispositions to act in specific ways

            Disposition = tendency (e.g., repressors tend to avoid threatening experiences)

            Broad = abstraction (not specific instance; adjectives (helpful) rather than verbs (help))

 

Traits are:

  1. Dimensional (ordering of people) not categorical
  2. Hypothetical (not observable)
  3. Causal (internal) or Descriptive (summaries)

 

Internal causal properties

ό      Internal: individuals carry their desires, needs, and wants from one situation to the next

ό      Causal: desires and needs explain the behavior of the individuals who possess them

 

Sanjeev is jealous because he is insecure

 

ό      Purely Descriptive Summaries

ό      Make no assumptions about internality, nor is causality assumed

ό      Trait describes expressed behavior

 

Rahul glares at other men who talk to his girlfriend. He must be jealous.

 

Traits are (continued):

  1. Organized  in a system
  2. Consistent over settings and time

 

4) Emotions

 

What are Emotions? An emotion is a complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioural, and physiological elements, by which the individual attempts to deal with a personally significant matter of event. Emotions have three components:

•         cognitive components

•          physiological components

•          expressive components

 

*      Affect: A broad range of feelings that people experience.

*      Emotions: Intense feelings that are directed at someone or something.

*      Moods: Feelings that tend to be less intense than emotions and that lack a contextual stimulus.

 

Emotions or feelings have always been a key point of interest in personality theories.  At the lowest level, we have pain and pleasure, which are really more like sensations than feelings.  There is also psychological pain and pleasure -- call them distress and delight -- which may be the root of all other emotions.  Distress is what we feel when the events of the world are more than we can handle.  Delight is what we feel when we discover that we can handle them after all!

 

Anxiety is a favourite topic in personality theories.  Although many definitions have been proposed for anxiety, they tend to revolve around unnecessary or inappropriate fear.  Kelly notes that it is actually the anticipation of a fearful situation, accurately or not.  Fear, in turn, is usually understood as involving the perception of imminent harm, physical or psychological.  These definitions serve well for most circumstances.

 

Guilt is another key emotion.  Related to shame, it is usually understood as the feelings aroused when one contravenes internalized social rules.  Kelly provides a useful elaboration:  He defines it as the feeling we get when we contravene our own self-definition (which may or may not involve those standard social rules!).  Existentialists add another detail by suggesting that guilt is closely related to the sense of regret, of opportunities not taken.

 

Sadness is the experience of the world not being as it should be, with the added notion that we have no power to alter the situation.  Instead, there is a need to alter ourselves -- something we are innately reluctant to do! Grief would be the obvious extreme example, and depression could be defined as unrealistic sadness that continues long after the original situation.

 

Anger is similar to sadness:  The world is not as it should be.  But now, there's the added notion that we must energize ourselves to change the situation.  When we act on our anger, it becomes aggression.  Anger and aggression are not necessarily bad:  It is our anger at social injustices, for example, and aggressive action to correct them, that makes for positive social change!  Unrealistic anger, the kind we hang on to despite the suffering it causes us and the people around us, could be labelled hostility.

 

There are, of course, many other emotions and emotional shadings we could try to define

•         When an employee expresses organizationally desired emotions during interpersonal interactions.

 

•         Employees can experience a conflict between

–        felt emotions: An individual’s actual emotions

–        displayed emotions: Emotions that are organizationally required and considered appropriate in a given job.

 

5) Perception

 

•         What is Perception?

–        A process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory impressions in order to give meaning to their environment.

 

•         Why Is it Important?

–        Because people’s behaviour is based on their perception of what reality is, not on reality itself. 

–        The world as it is perceived is the world that is behaviourally important.

 

•         We study this topic to better understand how people make attributions about events.

•         We don’t see reality.  We interpret what we see and call it reality.

•         The attribution process guides our behaviour, regardless of the truth of the attribution

 

¨      Attribution Theory

o       When individuals observe behaviour, they attempt to determine whether it is internally or externally caused.

¨      Fundamental Attribution Error

o       The tendency to underestimate the influence of external factors and overestimate the influence of internal factors when making judgments about the behaviour of others.

¨      Self-Serving Bias

o       The tendency for individuals to attribute their own successes to internal factors while putting the blame for failures on external factors.

 

Frequently Used Shortcuts in Judging Others

 

 

•         Selective Perception

–        People selectively interpret what they see on the basis of their interest, background, experience, and attitudes.

•         Halo or Horn Effect

–        Drawing a general impression about an individual on the basis of a single characteristic.

•         Contrast Effects

–        Evaluations of a person’s characteristics that are affected by comparisons with other people recently encountered who rank higher or lower on the same characteristics.

•         Projection

–        Attributing one’s own characteristics to other people

•         Stereotyping

–        Judging someone on the basis of one’s perception of the group to which that person belongs.