Chapter 2: Individual Differences: Personality, Perception, and Employee Attitudes

Introduction

While understanding organizational behavior, it is essential to know that employees with different personality and values may enact different behaviors to achieve their work goals, and these differences can be a reflection of personality and perceptual process.

Conceptual Framework of Individual Differences in Organizations

To meet the competition in global market, effective management of employees is crucial and this is only possible by understanding the profound significance of the individual differences especially in multicultural workplaces.

Personality and Personality Theories

Personality is “the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his unique adjustments to his environment” (Robbins and Judge, 2015). For our purposes, we should think of personality as the sum total of ways in which an individual reacts to and interacts with others. Personality traits are enduring characteristics that describe an individual’s behavior. Personality is considered to be formed as a result of combined hereditary (genetic) and environmental factors, moderated by situational conditions and has a big impact on how people are motivated.

Personality means how people affect others and how they understand and view themselves, as well as their pattern of inner and outer measurable traits and the person-situation interaction.

The basic theories that explain personality as follows:

• Cognitive theory: This theory posits that people develop their thinking patterns as their life unfolds. Accordingly, cognitions affect how the person interprets and internalizes life’s events.

• Learning theory: This theory suggests that behavior patterns develop from the social environment by social modeling and learning. Thus, a person’s personality is developed and shaped by the influence of the environment as well as by what the person learns from the environment through experiences or observations. In sum; people learn from,

• social interaction with other people,
• early family socialization,
• social environment (friends, teachers).

• Biological theory: This theory indicates that personality as genetically inherited.

• Develop common characteristics as a result of evolution
• Trait and gene come from parents

Although personality traits, long-term predispositions for behavior, have been generally downplayed and even totally discounted, in recent years there is now considerable support for a “five-factor trait-based theory of personality”. A huge number of personality traits are practically unusable and confusing, so further reduction analysis found five core personality traits. This is called “the Five-Factor Model (FFM) or “Big Five Personality Traits” in the field of organizational behavior and human resource management.

The real value of the Big Five to organizational behavior is that it does bring back the importance of predispositional traits and these traits have been clearly shown to relate to job performance. Importantly, it should also be noted that these five traits are quite stable. Interestingly, with groups rather than individuals becoming more important in today’s workplace, the Big Five may also be predictive of team performance.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) theory goes back to Carl Jung in the 1920s. Jung thought that people could be typed into extraverts and introverts and that they had two basic mental processes—perception and judgment. Then, he divided perception into sensing and intuiting and judgment into thinking and feeling. This created four personality dimensions or traits: (1) introversion/extraversion, (2) perceiving/judging, (3) sensing/ intuition, and (4) thinking/feeling. in the 1940s Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs-Myers developed about a 100-item personality test asking participants how they usually feel or act in particular situations in order to measure the preferences on the four pairs of traits yielding 16 distinct types. Called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the questions relate to how people prefer to focus their energies (extraversion vs. introversion); give attention and collect information (sensing vs. intuiting); process and evaluate information and make decisions (thinking vs. feeling); and orient themselves to the outside world (judging vs. perceiving).

Type A personality is characterized by impatience, a chronic sense of time urgency, enhanced competitiveness, aggressive drive, and often some hostility” (Friedman and Rosenman, 1974). Type A characteristics. Individuals with a Type A personality have been shown to report more work stressors and strain than individuals with the Type B personality. The theory further describes Type B individuals, who generally live at lower stress levels, work steadily, and enjoy achievement but not become stressed out when not achieving in contrast to Type A personalities. Type A and Type B personalities influence the employee attitudes and behaviors at work.

Previous literature defined proactivity as an individual trait and disposition towards work and initiative (See Taştan, 2013a). Proactive behavior is described as initiating an action for the aim to improve the current situation rather than accept it as it is. They do not blame circumstances, conditions, or the other people for their behavior. Thus, proactive behavior seeks to improvise the existing job along with developing personal prerequisites for furthering career success and organizational effectiveness.

Achievement Goal Theory proposes that individuals engage in behaviour with a competence-specific purpose. This purpose, an achievement orientation, thus describes the pattern of cognition and action that results from pursuing various goals. Achievement motivation is part of the earliest psychological theory of motivation which referred to the achievement motive as one of the three basic human motives. It suggested that achievement related situations are characterised by approach and avoidance components that stimulate hope for success or fear of failure. Situations that involve achievement can be divided into two main characteristics either approach or avoidance that in turn create feelings of hope for success or fear of failure.

Self-monitoring refers to an individual’s ability to adjust his or her behavior to external, situational factors. Individuals high in self-monitoring show considerable adaptability in adjusting their behavior to external situational factors. They are highly sensitive to external cues and can behave differently in different situations. Low self-monitors can’t disguise themselves in that way. They tend to display their true dispositions and attitudes in every situation. High self-monitors pay closer attention to the behavior of others. They also receive better performance ratings.

Self-control as a personality includes delay of gratification, effortful control, willpower, executive control, time preference, self-discipline, self-regulation, and ego strength. Scholars use the term self-control synonymously with conscientiousness that includes responsibility, industriousness, and orderliness. Selfcontrol also called as self-regulation, willpower, and effortful control. Impulsivity can be seen as the opposite of self-control. It describes “the tendency to act on a whim and, in so doing, disregard a more rational long-term strategy for success”.

Machiavellianism , the manipulative personality— emerged from Machiavelli’s original book of Prince. Machiavellianism is a personality trait that is characterized by manipulative and exploitative attitude toward others, lack of empathy, and a cynical view of human nature. They are usually autonomus, self-seeking, and lack social connectedness with others. Machiavellianism may be delineated by a combination of attributes such as dominant, selfseeking-utilitarian, secretive, suspicious, normavoiding, thinking in concrete and pragmatic terms as well as emotionally unstable and anxious in the context of close relationships.

Perception Process

Perception is a unique interpretation of the situation, not an exact recording of it. Perception is a very complex cognitive process that yields a unique picture of the world, a picture that may be quite different from reality.

Perceptual process involves target and threshold. Target is the object of the person’s perceptual process. Threshold means the minimum information from target for the person to notice the target. Threshold has two stages: Detection threshold means the point at which person notices something has changed in her or his environment. Recognition threshold means the point at which person can identify the target or give meaning to the target.

Perception is composed of several sub-processes . The first important sub-process is the stimulus or situation that is present. Perception begins when a person is confronted with a stimulus or a situation.

In addition to the situation-person interaction, there are the internal cognitive processes of registration, interpretation, and feedback. During the registration phenomenon, the physiological (sensory and neural) mechanisms are affected. Interpretation is the most significant cognitive aspect of perception. It means that a person recognizes and evaluates the target or the situation. The last sub-process is the feedback. Feedback is the response that a person received from the perceptual target or the situation.

A number of factors may influence out perception. These factors can reside in the perceiver; in the object, or target being perceived; or in the context of the situation in which the perception is made.

Personal characteristics: When you look at a target and attempt to interpret what you see, your interpretation is heavily influenced by your personal characteristics—your attitudes, personality, motives, interests, past experiences, and expectations.

Characteristics of the target: They also affect what we perceive.

The context of the situation (Situational factors): The time when we see an object or event can influence our attention, as can location, light, heat, or any number of situational factors.

Perceptual errors are the mistakes in the perceptual process. Stereotype and the halo effect are the common perceptual errors. Stereotypes are the beliefs and perceived attributes about a target based on any characteristic. The term stereotype refers to the tendency to perceive another person (hence social perception) as belonging to a single class or category. In particular, it is employed in analyzing prejudice. The halo effect in social perception is very similar to stereotyping. Whereas in stereotyping the person is perceived according to a single category, under the halo effect the person is perceived on the basis of one trait. The opposite is sometimes called the “horns effect” where an individual is downgraded because of a single negative characteristic or incident.

Social perception is the process by which people come to know and understand each other Social perception consists forming impression of a person. It means that a perceiver first observes the person, the situation, and the person’s behavior.

Attribution theory tries to explain the ways in which we judge people differently, depending on the meaning we attribute to a given behaviour. It suggests that when we observe an individual’s behavior, we attempt to determine whether it was internally or externally caused. That determination, however, depends largely on three factors: (1) distinctiveness, (2) consensus, and (3) consistency.

Distinctiveness refers to whether an individual displays different behaviors in different situations.

If everyone who faces a similar situation responds in the same way, we can say the behavior shows consensus.

Finally, an observer looks for consistency in a person’s actions

Internally caused behaviors are those we believe to be under the personal control of the individual. Externally caused behavior is what we imagine the situation forced the individual to do.

One of the most interesting findings from attribution theory research is that errors or biases distort attributions. When we make judgments about the behavior of other people, we tend to underestimate the influence of external factors and overestimate the influence of internal or personal factors

Individuals and organizations also tend to attribute their own successes to internal factors such as ability or effort, while blaming failure on external factors such as bad luck or unproductive co-workers. This is called as the selfserving bias.

Values as Individual Differences

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.” 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.

Values lay the foundation for our understanding of people’s attitudes and motivation and influence our perceptions. Values influence attitudes and behaviors.

Rokeach classified values as terminal and instrumental values. One set, called 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.

The growing generation gap can play a role within interpersonal communication. understanding the generational values is essential. For example, today’s younger generation are more interested in economic control than in control over people or in status and climbing the corporate ladder.

The effort to match job requirements with personality characteristics is best articulated in John Holland’s personality–job fit theory. Holland presents six personality types and proposes that satisfaction and the propensity to leave a position depend on how well individuals match their personalities to a job. The theory argues that satisfaction is highest and turnover lowest when personality and occupation are in agreement.

Researchers have looked at matching people to organizations as well as to jobs. 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. Following these guidelines at the time of hiring should identify new employees who fit better with the organization’s culture, which should, in turn, result in higher employee satisfaction and reduced turnover.

Employee Attitudes

Attitude is a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavour. Attitudes can be based on affective, cognitive, or behavioral information and can vary in their strength. The object or the target a person develops attitude is called as an attitude object and it can be any physical object, issue, idea, event, person, place, etc.

As global and enduring evaluations, attitudes can be based on three separate components. These are named as “affective”, “cognitive”, and “behavioral”. An attitude can be based on any one or a combination of these three information sources.

The “affective” basis of an attitude is made up of feelings, moods, and emotions that have become associated with the attitude object through past or current experience.

The “cognitive” basis is made up of particular attributes that are ascribed to the object. An attribute is any characteristic, quality, trait, concept, value, or goal associated with the object.

The “behavioral” basis is made up of two kinds of information, past behaviors and intentions to commit future behaviors.

All three types of responses, cognitive, affective and behavioral, are external, and observable cues to infer a latent attitude and the scholars have indicated that there is a consistency between attitude and behavior.

Early studies advocated that attitudes were closely related to behaviors. However, in the late 1960s, one researcher - Leon Festinger (1958)- argued that attitudes follow behavior. Festinger (1958) proposed that cases of attitude following behavior illustrate the effects of cognitive dissonance, any incompatibility an individual might perceive between two or more attitudes or between behavior and attitudes. Festinger (1958) argued that any form of inconsistency is uncomfortable and that individuals will therefore attempt to reduce it.

Employee Job Attitudes

Most of the research in OB has looked at three attitudes: job satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational commitment and one fundemental concept, organizational citizenship behavior.

When people speak of employee attitudes, they usually mean job satisfaction, which describes a positive feeling about a job, resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics. A person with a high level of job satisfaction holds positive feelings about his or her job, while a person with a low level holds negative feelings.

Job satisfaction is an emotional response to a job situation. Moreover, it is often determined by how well outcomes meet or exceed expectations.

Through the years five job dimensions have been identified to represent the most important characteristics of a job about which employees have affective responses:

1. The work itself.
2. Pay.
3. Promotion opportunities.
4. Supervision.
5. Coworkers.

Job satisfaction leads to various positive employee outcomes and organizational outcomes. It promotes and improves organizational and individual effectiveness and performance. It decreases employee turnover rates, absenteesm, deviant behaviors and job stress.

In organizational commitment, an employee identifies with a particular organization and its goals and wishes to remain a member. As an attitude, organizational commitment is an attitude reflecting employees’ loyalty to their organization and is an ongoing process through which organizational participants express their concern for the organization and its continued success and well-being.

Because of this multidimensional nature of organizational commitment, there is growing support for the threecomponent model proposed by Meyer and Allen.

The three dimensions are as follows:

1. Affective commitment involves the employee’s emotional attachment to, identification with, and involvement in the organization.
2. Continuance commitment involves commitment based on the costs that the employee associates with leaving the organization.
3. Normative commitment involves employees’ feelings of obligation to stay with the organization because they should; it is the right thing to do.

Related to job satisfaction, job involvement, which measures the degree to which people identify psychologically with their job and consider their perceived performance level important to self-worth. Employees with a high level of job involvement strongly identify with and really care about the kind of work they do.

Another closely related concept is psychological empowerment, employees’ beliefs in the degree to which they influence their work environment, their competence, the meaningfulness of their job, and their perceived autonomy. High levels of both job involvement and psychological empowerment are positively related to organizational citizenship and job performance. Organizational citizenship behavior was coined by Organ and his colleagues. It is defined as “individual behavior that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, and that in the aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the organization.

Organizational citizenship behavior is set of behaviors which go beyond the formal job requirements and have a positive impact on organizational outcomes. In literature, organizational citizenship behavior is also known as prosocial organizational behavior, extra-role behavior or counter-role behaviour.

Organizational citizenship behavior has five main dimensions: Conscientiousness, sportsmanship, civic virtue, courtesy and altruism:

Conscientiousness refers to perform one’s role behaviors well beyond the minimum job requirements, such as attending required meetings, keeping one’s work area clean, punctuality, and obedience to formal and informal rules.

Sportsmanship refers to behaviors such as working without complaining and maintaining positive attitude against enduring uncomfortable working conditions.

Civic virtue refers to voluntarily being included in organizational activities and supporting organization’s functions.

Courtesy refers to prevention of problems and taking necessary steps to reduce its negative effects in future.

Altruism refers to provide helping behavior to others.

Organizational citizenship behavior is related to organizational performance on the basis of some parameters which are reduced absenteeism, reduced turnover, employees’ satisfaction, employees’ loyalty, and employees’ retention.