Chapter 9

"Am not easily bothered by things"

Neuroticism

The Effects of Faking on Correlations with Integrity Tests

• Most people Fake It - they exaggerate their responses to a personality test in a socially desirable fashion. • Dishonest people "fake it" a bit more than honest people - but not by a lot. • Because everyone fakes to some degree, correlations with outcomes like theft or other counterproductive behaviors are relatively unaffected.

"Am always prepared"

Conscientiousness

"Make plans and stick to them"

Conscientiousness

"Am skilled in handling social situation"

Extraversion

"Am the life of the party"

Extraversion

"Dislike myself"

Neuroticism

"Have frequent mood swings"

Neuroticism

"Believe in the importance of art"

Openness to experience

The Big Five Personality Dimensions and Associated Traits

• Conscientiousness • Agreeableness • Neuroticism • Openness • Extraversion

How important are Personality and Cultural Values?

• Conscientiousness has a moderate positive effect on Performance • Conscientious employees have higher levels of Task Performance • They also are more likely to engage in Citizenship Behavior and less likely to engage in Counterproductive Behavior • Conscientiousness has a moderate positive effect on Commitment • Conscientiousness employees have higher levels of Affective Commitment and higher levels of Normative Commitment • Conscientiousness has no effect on Continuance Commitment • Conscientious employees have higher levels of motivation than other employees. They are more self-confident, perceive a clearer linkage between their effort and their performance, and are more likely to set goals and commit to them. • Conscientious employees also tend to have higher levels of Job Satisfaction. These positive feelings foster citizenship and make them less likely to feel a need to retaliate against their organization. Their dependable and reliable nature prevent them from violating organizational norms by engaging in negative actions. • Conscientious employees are less likely to engage in withdrawal behaviors and less likely to leave.

Using Personality and Integrity Tests as hiring tool

• Experts on personnel selection agree that personality and integrity tests are among the most useful tools for hiring - more useful even than the typical version of the employment interview • One of the only tools that is more useful than a personality test is an ability test

Openness to experience

• High- curious, imaginative, creative, complex, refined, and sophisticated. curious, imaginative, creative, complex, refined, and sophisticated. • Opposite- uninquisitive, conventional, conforming, simple, unartistic, traditional. • Openness to experience is also more likely to be valuable in jobs that require high levels of creativity, defined as the capacity to generate novel and useful ideas and solutions. • Highly open individuals are more likely to migrate into artistic and scientific fields.

Conscientiousness

• High- dependable, organized, reliable, ambitious, hardworking, and persevering • Opposite- carless, sloppy, inefficient, negligent, lazy, irresponsible • Conscientiousness has the biggest influence on job performance • Conscientiousness employees prioritize accomplishment striving, which reflects a strong desire to accomplish task-related goals as a means of expressing personality

Neuroticism

• High- nervous, moody, emotional, insecure, and jealous • Opposite- calm, steady, relaxed, at ease, secure, contented • Synonymous with negative affectivity • a dispositional tendency to experience unpleasant moods such as hostility, nervousness, and annoyance. • Neuroticism is associated with a differential exposure to stressors • they are more likely to appraise day-to-day situations as stressful • Neuroticism is associated with differential reactivity to stressors • they don't believe they can cope with the stressors they experience • Neuroticism is also strongly related to locus of control, which reflects whether people attribute the causes of events to themselves or to the external environment. • Tend to hold an external locus of control, meaning that they often believe that the events that occur around them are driven by luck, chance, or fate. • Less neurotic people tend to hold an internal locus of control, meaning that they believe that their own behavior dictates events. Neurotic people tend to hold an external locus of control.

Extraversion

• High- talkative, sociable, passionate, assertive, bold, and dominant. • Opposite- quiet, shy, inhibited, bashful, reserved, submissive •Prioritize status striving • which reflects a strong desire to obtain power and influence within a social structure as a means of expressing personality. •Tend to be high in what's called positive affectivity • a dispositional tendency to experience pleasant, engaging moods such as enthusiasm, excitement, and elation.

Agreeableness

• High- warm, kind, cooperative, sympathetic, helpful, and courteous • Opposite- critical, antagonistic, callous, selfish, rude, cold • prioritize communion striving, which reflects a strong desire to obtain in personal relationships as a means of expressing personality • beneficial in some positions but detrimental in others • Agreeable people focus on "getting along," not necessarily "getting ahead"

Veiled Purpose Examples

• I rarely do things impulsively. • I try to avoid hurting people's feelings. • There are people out there I'd like to get back at. • I'm someone who follows the rules.

Dimensions of Cultural Values

• Individualism vs Collectivism • Power Distance • High- accepts the fact that power is usually distributed unequally with organizations (Russia, China, Indonesia) • Low- prefers that power be distributed uniformly where possible, in a more egalitarian fashion (US, Germany, Netherlands) • Uncertainty Avoidance • High- feels threatened by uncertain and ambiguous situations and relies on formal rules to create stability (Japan, Russia, France) • Low- tolerates uncertain and ambiguous situations and values unusual ideas and behavior (US, Indonesia, Netherlands) • Masculinity- Femininity • Masculinity- values stereotypically male traits such as assertiveness and the acquisition of money and things (US, Japan, Germany) • Femininity- values stereotypically female traits such as caring for others and caring about quality of life (Netherland, Russia, France) • Short-term vs Long-Term Orientation • Short-term- stresses values that are more past and present orientated, such as respect for tradition and fulfilling obligations (US, Russia, West Africa) • Long-term- stresses values that are more future-oriented, such as persistence, prudence, and thrift (China, Japan, Netherlands)

Project GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness)

• Main purpose is to examine the impact of culture on the effectiveness of various leader attributes, behaviors, and practices • 9 Dimensions identified: 1. Power Distance - (same as Hofstede) 2. Uncertainty Avoidance - (same as Hofstede) 3. Institutional collectivism - formalized practices encourage collective action and collective distribution of resources. 4. Ingroup collectivism - individuals express pride and loyalty to specific ingroups 5. Gender Egalitarianism - culture promotes gender equality and minimizes role differences between men and women 6. Assertiveness - culture values assertiveness, confrontation, and aggressiveness in social relationships 7. Future Orientation - culture engages in planning and investmen tin the future while delaying individual or collective gratification 8. Performance Orientation - culture encourages and rewards members for escellence and performance improvements 9. Humane Orientation - culture encourages and rewards members for being generous, caring, kind, fair, and altruistic.

Other Taxonomies of Personality

• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) - Evaluates individuals on the basis of four types of preferences: • Extraversion (social interactions) vs Introversion (private time and reflection) • Sensing (clear and concrete facts and data) vs Intuition (hunches and speculations) • Thinking (decisions with logic and critical analysis) vs Feeling (emphasis and others' needs and feelings) • Judging (planning and setting goals) vs Perceiving (flexibility and spontaneity when performing tasks) • People are categorized into one of 16 different types on the basis of their preferences • ISTJ would have a preference for Introversion, Sensing, Thinking, and Judging • Most useful in a teambuilding context, to help different members understand their varying approaches to accomplishing tasks • research indicates using MBTI as any kind of hiring or selection too is not justified

Personality, Cultural Values, and Ability

• Personality • refers to the structures and propensities inside a person that explain his or her characteristic patterns of through, emotion, and behavior • Traits • recurring regularities or trends in people's responses to their environment- adjectives that describe your common patterns of behavior • Cultural Values • reflect the shared beliefs about desirable end states or modes of conduct in a given culture • Adjectives that describe values that can be used to summarize a nation's culture • assertive • tradition • informal

Clear Purpose Examples

• Would you say that most people lie on their resume? - conscientiousness • Have you ever taken something home from work without saying anything about it? - agreeableness • If a cashier gave you too much change, do you think you'd point out the error? • At what dollar value would theft from work become a fireable offense?

Cultural Values

• difference in vultural values can create differences to change, conflict management styles, negotiation approaches, and reward preferences • Employees working in different countries tended to prioritize different values, and those values clustered into several distinct dimensions • cultural values come to reflect the way things should be done in a given society

Application: Personality Tests

• pencil and paper personality tests are commonly used to evaluate job candidates • Questions May Evaluate things like: • You do things carefully so you don't make mistakes (high conscientiousness) • You can easily cheer up and forget a problem (low neuroticism) • You don't act polite when you don't want to (low agreeableness) • You'd rather blend into the crowd than stand out (low extraversion) • Integrity Tests - personality tests that focus specifically on a predisposition to engage in theft and other counterproductive behaviors. • Clear Purpose tests - directly ask questions about applicants attitudes toward dishonesty • Veiled Purpose tests - more general personality traits associated with dishonest acts