CHAPTER 11 - CHAPTER 11 | Managing Individual Differences...

CHAPTER 11 | Managing Individual Differences & Behavior: Supervising People as People
11.1 Personality & Individual Behavior
Personality- consists of the stable psychological traits and behavioral attributes that give a person
his or her identity
Big Five Personality Dimensions
1. Extroversion - how outgoing, talkative, sociable, and assertive a person is.
2. Agreeableness - how trusting, good-natured, cooperative, and soft-hearted one is
3. Conscientious - how dependable, responsible, achievement-oriented, and persistent on is
4. Emotional stability -how relaxed, secure, and unworried one is.
5. Openness to experience - how intellectual, imaginative, curious, and broad-mined one is.
*Extroversion is a strong predictor of job performance than agreeableness across all professions
especially salespeople and managers
** Conscientiousness has been found to have the strongest positive correlation with job
performance and training performance.
Cautions about using personality tests in the workplace:
• Use professionals
• Don't hire on the basis of personality test results alone
• Be alert for gender, racial, and ethnic bias
• Graphology tests don't work but integrity tests do
Proactive Personality- someone who is more apt to take initiative and persevere to influence the
environment-identify opportunities and act on them, which makes them associated not only with
success but also entrepreneuship.
Five Important Traits in Organizations
1. Locus of control: I am/ am not the captain of my fate
• Indicates how much people believe their fate through their own efforts
• Internal Locus - you control your destiny-exhibit less anxiety, greater work
motivation, and stronger expectations that effort leads to performance, higher
salaries, resist close managerial supervision, prefer incentives and sales commissions
• External Locus - external forces control you, like structure and supervision,
2. Self-Efficacy: I can/can't do this task
• Self-efficacy- belief in one's personal ability to do a task-your personal belief that
you have what it takes to succeed. High expectations of self efficacy  positive
• Learned helplessness- the debilitating lack of faith in one's ability to control one's
environment, associated with low self efficacy
o Assign jobs accordingly-assign complex, challenging, autonomous jobs, not
boring tedious ones
o Develop self-efficacy-to build it give them constructive pointers and
feedback
3. Self-esteem: I like/dislike myself

• Self-esteem- the extent to which people like or dislike themselves, their overall self
evaluation
o People with high self-esteem handle failure better and are more independent
as opposed to people with low self-esteem, take more risks, may be
aggressive or violent. Low  dependent on others, negative thoughts, likely
to be influenced easily
4. Self-Monitoring: I'm fairly able/unable to adapt my behavior to others
• The extent to which people are able to observe their own behavior and adapt to
external situations-if you can tell that someone if busy, you know to leave them alone
instead of keep talking. High