MGT (ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR)

Big boss

Personality_sessionB_.pptx

Home >Business & Finance homework help >Management homework help >MGT (ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR)

Personality – Session B

Attendance

Review of research on personality

The problems with the MBTI personality test (and, more generally, profile analyses)…

How trustworthy is the research on cultural dimensions (e.g., individualism-collectivism, masculinity-femininity)?

Explanation of final individual paper

© 2017 by McGraw-Hill Education. This is proprietary material solely for authorized instructor use. Not authorized for sale or distribution in any manner. This document may not be copied, scanned, duplicated, forwarded, distributed, or posted on a website, in whole or part.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

Four continuums

Extraversion vs. Introversion

Sensing vs. Intuition

Thinking vs. Feeling

Judging vs. Perceiving

This leads to 16 categories because…(do the “tree branch thingy”)

Source:

ND Strupler

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

Extraversion vs. Introversion

Extraversion: You direct your energy toward the outside world and get energized by interacting with people and taking action.

Introversion: You direct your energy toward you own inner world and get energized by reflecting on your ideas and experiences.

Sensing vs. Intuition

Thinking vs. Feeling

Judging vs. Perceiving

Source:

ND Strupler

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiKLD4Sb-X4

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

Extraversion vs. Introversion

Sensing vs. Intuition

Sensing: You take in information that is real and tangible and focus mainly on what you perceive using your five senses.

Intuition: You take in information by seeing the big picture and focus mainly on the patterns and interrelationships you perceive.

Thinking vs. Feeling

Judging vs. Perceiving

Source:

ND Strupler

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiKLD4Sb-X4

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

Extraversion vs. Introversion

Sensing vs. Intuition

Thinking vs. Feeling

Thinking: You base your conclusions on logic, with accuracy and objective truth as the primary goals.

Feeling: You base your conclusions on personal and social values, with understanding and harmony as the primary goals.

Judging vs. Perceiving

Source:

ND Strupler

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiKLD4Sb-X4

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

Extraversion vs. Introversion

Sensing vs. Intuition

Thinking vs. Feeling

Judging vs. Perceiving

Judging: You approach the world with decisiveness and tend to like planning and closure.

Perceiving: You approach the world with flexibility and tend to like spontaneity and openness.

Source:

ND Strupler

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiKLD4Sb-X4

Four main problems with the MBTI

Poor reliability

Lack of predictive validity

Categories polarize people into extremes

Categories are not comprehensive enough

MBTI is about as useful as a polygraph for detecting lies. One researcher even called it an “act of irresponsible armchair philosophy.”

Source: Grant, A. (Sep 18, 2013). Goodbye to MBTI, the Fad that Won’t Die. Retrieved from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/give-and-take/201309/goodbye-mbti-the-fad-won-t-die

Four main problems with the MBTI

Poor reliability

Reliability means getting consistent results over time.

Research shows “that as many as three-quarters of test takers achieve a different personality type when tested again.”

“If you retake the test after only a five-week gap, there's around a 50% chance that you will fall into a different personality category.”

Not surprisingly, “the sixteen distinctive types described by the Myers-Briggs have no scientific basis whatsoever.”

Lack of predictive validity

Categories polarize people into extremes

Categories are not comprehensive enough

Source: Grant, A. (Sep 18, 2013). Goodbye to MBTI, the Fad that Won’t Die. Retrieved from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/give-and-take/201309/goodbye-mbti-the-fad-won-t-die

Four main problems with the MBTI

Poor reliability

Lack of predictive validity

There is no convincing body of evidence that types affect job performance or team effectiveness.

As management researchers William Gardner and Mark Martinko write in a comprehensive review, “Few consistent relationships between type and managerial effectiveness have been found.”

Categories polarize people into extremes

Categories are not comprehensive enough

Source: Grant, A. (Sep 18, 2013). Goodbye to MBTI, the Fad that Won’t Die. Retrieved from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/give-and-take/201309/goodbye-mbti-the-fad-won-t-die

Four main problems with the MBTI

Poor reliability

Lack of predictive validity

Categories polarize people into extremes

For example, thinking and feeling are opposite poles of a continuum. In reality, they’re independent: Three decades of evidence indicate that if you like ideas and data, you can also like people and emotions. (In fact, more often than not, they go hand in hand: people with stronger thinking and reasoning skills are also better at recognizing, understanding, and managing emotions.)  That is, general intelligence and emotional intelligence are highly correlated.

Like all personality traits, introver-extraver follows a bell curve: It’s most common to be in the middle. The vast majority are are ambiverts. Most people are “neither overly extraverted nor wildly introverted

Categories are not comprehensive enough

Source: Grant, A. (Sep 18, 2013). Goodbye to MBTI, the Fad that Won’t Die. Retrieved from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/give-and-take/201309/goodbye-mbti-the-fad-won-t-die

Four main problems with the MBTI

Poor reliability

Lack of predictive validity

Categories polarize people into extremes

Categories are not comprehensive enough

For example, the judging component in the judging-perceiving scale captures whether I’m an organizer and a planner, but overlooks the industriousness and achievement drive that tend to accompany these characteristics—together, they form a personality trait called conscientiousness.

Source: Grant, A. (Sep 18, 2013). Goodbye to MBTI, the Fad that Won’t Die. Retrieved from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/give-and-take/201309/goodbye-mbti-the-fad-won-t-die

Why does MBTI remain popular despite its problems?

Thousands of people have invested time and money in becoming MBTI-certified trainers and coaches.

It’s taken by more than 2.5 million people a year, and used by 89 of the Fortune 100 companies.

The other is the “aha” moment that people experience when the test gives them insight about others—and especially themselves. “Those who love type,” Murphy Paul writes, “have been seduced by an image of their own ideal self.” Once that occurs, personality psychologist Brian Little says, raising doubts about “reliability and [predictive] validity is like commenting on the tastiness of communion wine. Or how good a yarmulke is at protecting your head.”

Source: Grant, A. (Sep 18, 2013). Goodbye to MBTI, the Fad that Won’t Die. Retrieved from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/give-and-take/201309/goodbye-mbti-the-fad-won-t-die

If MBTI sucks, what should we rely on?

Big 5! (i.e., CANOE or OCEAN—pick your favorite)

Big 5 personality traits are (a) reliable; (b) have decent predictive validity (e.g., job performance); (c) mutually distinctive from one another; and (d) comprehensive. Even better when other-rated.

Not surprisingly, the Big 5 traits even have genetic and biological bases, and researchers in the emerging field of personality neuroscience have begun mapping the Big Five to relevant brain regions.

The Big Five are far from perfect, and there’s growing support for a HEXACO model of personality that adds a sixth trait: honesty-humility (e.g., sincerity, fairness, greed avoidance).

Source: Grant, A. (Sep 18, 2013). Goodbye to MBTI, the Fad that Won’t Die. Retrieved from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/give-and-take/201309/goodbye-mbti-the-fad-won-t-die

Profile analysis is similar to the MBTI in nature

An emerging trend in organizational behavior (OB) is to take existing variables, derive categories of people who fall on various values of the variables, and then use the categories to predict outcomes. This is called profile analysis (or, latent profile analysis—which is just a fancier way of calling it).

E.g., Profile analysis has also been applied to the Big 5

But the very act of departing from an variable-based approach to a category-based approach by artificially dichotomizing variables is flawed because it loses information about people in the middle of two extremes..

By the way, criminal profiling (e.g., FBI) is pseudo-science (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/11/12/dangerous-minds)

Source: Attending scholarly presentations

Cultural Values

Shared beliefs about desirable end states or modes of conduct in a given culture

Cultural values provide societies with their own distinctive personalities

Source:

John Wick

Potential counter to critiquing this: I can think of many examples that fit this description. -> But are you engaging in confirmation?

These are analogous to the Big 5 for individuals

Power Distance

1	2	3	4	5
STRONGLY DISAGREE	DISAGREE	NEUTRAL	AGREE	STRONGLY AGREE
1. A company’s norms should be followed, even if an employee disagrees with them.				__________
2. Letting employees have a say in decisions eats away at managerial authority.				__________
3. A good manager should be able to make decisions without consulting employees.				__________
4. If employees disagree with the company’s actions, they should keep it to themselves.				__________
5. Employees should not question the decisions that top management makes.				__________
6. Managers lose effectiveness when employees second-guess their actions.				__________
7. Managers have a right to expect employees to listen to them.				__________
8. Efficient managerial decision-making requires little employee input.				__________

Bonus Assessment: Power Distance. The PowerPoints for our text now include 26 Bonus Assessments to supplement the 16 OB Assessments in the chapters. When combined with the 30 Self-Assessments in Connect, there are a total of 72 assessments that can be used to help your students learn where they fall on OB concepts.

This brief survey can be used to give students a feel for how the cultural value of power distance manifests in the workplace. The average score for this scale is shown on the slide (20 in this case). Recognize that this is an admittedly arbitrary way of classifying “high” vs. “low”. I use a show of hands to see how many students fall above and below the average, and I then see if students will volunteer any extremely high or low scores.

Source: Original items. For a published version of this assessment, see Earley, P. C., & Erez, M. 1997. The transplanted executive: Why you need to understand how workers in other countries see the world different. New York: Oxford University Press.

Please see the Connect assignments for this chapter for assessments on Collectivism and Locus of Control. Please email me at colq@uga.edu for any questions about these assessments.

Why research on cultural values is highly questionable

Data collection & use: Hofstede’s data were based on employee surveys completed around 1967 and 1973 within IBM subsidiaries in 66 countries.

But the data from only 40 countries were used in characterizing national cultures.

In only six of the included countries (Belgium, France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan and Sweden) were the numbers of respondents more than 1000 in both surveys. In 15 countries (Chile, Columbia, Greece, Hong Kong, Iran, Ireland, Israel, New Zealand, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Turkey) the numbers were less than 200.

The data used to construct national cultural comparisons were largely limited to responses from marketing-plus-sales employees.

Source: McSweeney, B. (2002). Hofstede’s model of national cultural differences and their consequences: A triumph of faith-a failure of analysis. Human relations, 55(1), 89-118.

Why research on cultural values is highly questionable

Narrative fallacy: He lists a wide range of national institutions, events, and artifacts – including ‘architecture’, ‘religion’, ‘literature’, ‘industrial relations systems’, ‘family structures’, ‘religious organizations’, ‘scientific theories’, and ‘social stratification’ which he claims are ‘consequences of’, or ‘crystalliz[ations] of’, national cultures. Indeed he seems to suggest that the list is unlimited: ‘no part of our lives’, he states, ‘is exempt’.

But these are simply anecdotes.

And anecdotes do not constitute evidence.

Source: McSweeney, B. (2002). Hofstede’s model of national cultural differences and their consequences: A triumph of faith-a failure of analysis. Human relations, 55(1), 89-118.

Why research on cultural values is highly questionable

Ambiguous causality: Hofstede credits strong, often absolute, causality to national cultures. That is, national culture  events, institutions, etc.

Yet what about reverse causality? What about a confound variable? Not enough evidence to rule out these alternative explanations.

Let’s do an exercise: Wotherspoon and Satzwich (1993) describe a study that determined that aboriginal Canadian people do not value cars, televisions, and other such material goods. This was considered to be a cultural phenomenon. (One answer on next bullet.)

However, Wotherspoon and Satzwich point out that it may simply be the lousy roads and reception band in their area that have rendered the commodities valueless.

Source: McSweeney, B. (2002). Hofstede’s model of national cultural differences and their consequences: A triumph of faith-a failure of analysis. Human relations, 55(1), 89-118.

Why research on cultural values is highly questionable

Misinterpretation of evidence: “What is true for a part is true for the whole" is an assumption that needs to hold for the use of a single MNC (i.e., IBM) to be generalizable. However, this assumption leads to ridiculous conclusions—i.e., reductio ad absurdum.

Following the [re]integration of Hong Kong into China are we to believe that what was measured in the IBM subsidiary in Hong Kong is also true for the entire Chinese nation?

If Germany and Austria were to unite into one Germanic country, which national culture scores should be applied to the whole, especially since the two are actually quite different despite both countries speaking German? Germany versus Austria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r61EcyegBM

Source: McSweeney, B. (2002). Hofstede’s model of national cultural differences and their consequences: A triumph of faith-a failure of analysis. Human relations, 55(1), 89-118.

Final individual paper: overview

I will ask you to read four sources:

Ericsson et al. (2007, HBR) – Deliberate practice

Gladwell (Dec 15, 2008) – Predicting performance

Gladwell (2008, Outliers) – Practical intelligence

Gladwell (July 22, 2002) – Talent myth

See the “Final individual paper (sources)” folder on Isidore

You will then write half a page per source. In total, the paper should be no more than 2 pages.

All critiques must be typed. Use 1-inch margins all around and double-spacing with a 12-point font based on Times New Roman. I will only accept electronic copies.

1. Ericsson et al. (2007, HBR) – Deliberate practice

The article states: “This kind of deliberate practice can be adapted to developing business and leadership expertise.”

To what extent may their recommendations lack practical utility?

1. Ericsson et al. (2007, HBR) – Deliberate practice

Suggestions for critiquing this article based on lack of practical utility:

What might be some jobs where you face significant pressure to work/performance and often play, but not many opportunities to engage in deliberate practice?

What if you are a working parent of multiple children, and your spouse works too? Would that impact your ability and/or motivation to engage in deliberate practice?

Other

2. Gladwell (Dec 15, 2008) – Predicting performance

The author claims that the “quarterback problem” means that the profession should keep the gates wide open.

But is predicting quarterback performance in the NFL truly inherently unpredictable? Is the author incorrectly or incompletely interpreting the situation?

After all, elite levels in science, art, music, etc. all seem vastly different from non-elite levels, but for these, the author emphasizes the importance of deliberate practice in other works.

Explain how the article suffers from misinterpretation of evidence when discussing the unpredictability of which college players will do well in the NFL.

2. Gladwell (Dec 15, 2008) – Predicting performance

Hints/suggestions for critiquing this article:

One possibility: Range restriction

Another possibility: Structured versus unstructured

Other

3. Gladwell (2008, Outliers) – Practical intelligence

I agree with the author’s conclusion that IQ alone cannot explain who succeeds and who do not. Job knowledge also counts above and beyond IQ.

But even if the conclusion happens to be sound, the way he makes this argument may not. Why? Explain how the author potentially commits the narrative fallacy.

4. Gladwell (July 22, 2002) – Talent myth

I agree with the author that talent mind-set had a direct impact on Enron’s decline.

But, I strongly suspect that the relationship between the talent mind-set and organizational decline is largely inflated because of a third (i.e., confounding variable).

Explain how the article potentially suffers from ambiguous causality.

Hints: Leadership by top management, environmental factors exerting pressure on the organization, personality of leaders.