Discussion 2

Welcome again to Organizational Behavior. This module will prepare you to meet the 

course learning objectives of identifying themes that influence a person’s perception 

and the decision-making process. Our first topic covers personality and 

values and their influence in the workplace. In order for managers to better predict and 

understand behavior, they must know the personalities of those who work for them. 

We will review some of the research over personalities and examine how our values shape 

many of our work-related behaviors. Let’s first look at Personality. 

We will begin by defining personality. It’s a dynamic concept describing the growth 

and development of a person’s whole psychological system. 

We can think of it as the sum total of ways in which an individual interprets, 

understands and reacts to and interacts with others. 

One of the greatest challenges in the study of personality is its measurement. 

Managers need to know how to measure personality because accurately measuring personality 

gives managers an advantage in the workplace. The most common means of measuring personality is 

through self-report surveys in which individuals evaluate themselves on a series of factors, 

such as “I worry a lot about the future”. Some of you may be familiar with the 

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) which is a widely used personality framework. 

I am sure many of you have taken a version of this instrument at some point either for your employer 

or somewhere during your education. In OB, a common framework to understand 

personality comes from The Big Five Personality Model. 

Modern efforts to define personality started in the early part of the 20th century when 

psychologists took from the dictionary 18,000 personality terms. Finally, in the 1950’s, 

two Air Force contactors discovered the majority of personality items statistically reduced to just 

five factors which quickly became known as the Big Five Personality Factors. 

Keep in mind that this model depicts personality at its broadest level of abstraction, 

as nearly all of a person’s characteristics are described using just these 5 traits. The five 

trait dimensions are: Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability (Narcissism), 

Extraversion, Openness & Agreeableness There has been a lot of research on the Big 

Five Traits influence on performance at work. Here are some basic conclusions from the research: 

Conscientiousness is the best predictor of job performance. People who rank high in 

conscientiousness are organized, willing to work hard, and achievement oriented. 

Emotional stability is most strongly related to life satisfaction, 

job satisfaction, and low stress levels. This is an 

important trait considering the rapidly changing demands of the current workplace. 

Extraverts tend to perform better in jobs that require significant interpersonal interaction, 

like sales and customer service. Those who score high in openness 

cope better with organizational change. And, agreeable individuals are better liked 

and tend to do well in teams and in customer service positions. 

Our Values also greatly impact our behaviors in the workplace. 

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. They contain a judgmental element in 

that they carry an individual’s ideas as to what is right, good, or desirable. 

All of us have a hierarchy of values that forms our value system. This is the relative importance 

we assign to values such as freedom, pleasure, self-respect, honesty, obedience, and equality. 

Values tend to be relatively stable and enduring. They lay the foundation for 

understanding people’s attitudes, motivation, and behavior (which we discuss in the next module). 

In OB, we also assess personality through Person-Job Fit and Person-Organization Fit. 

When companies recruit candidates, they are concerned with matching both the personality 

and the values of an employee with those of the job and the organization. 

Research confirms that job satisfaction and the propensity to leave a job 

(turnover) depend on the degree to which individuals successfully match their 

personalities to an occupational environment. A common assessment to assess person-job fit 

and to a lesser extent, person-organization fit is the Holland Typology of Personality 

and Congruent Occupations. Another way to assess personality 

in the workplace is to use Hofstede’s 5 Value Dimensions of National Culture. 

In the module, you will find view a video to help you gain a better understanding of 

Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions. Values are learned and passed down through generations 

and vary by cultures. Hofstede studied the impact of culture on work-related values. In doing so, he 

examined the nations of the world and classified them based on the values their population shared. 

The five value dimensions are: Power Distance, Individualism versus Collectivism, Masculinity 

versus Femininity, Uncertainty Avoidance, Long-term versus Short-term Orientation 

The GLOBE Framework built upon Hofstede’s research and has added additional 

four additional National Culture dimensions. In our next topic, we explore Perception and 

Individual Decision Making. We examine how perception 

acts to create an employee’s view of reality and modifies decision making. 

Perception is the process through which people organize and interpret their sensory information. 

Perception is related to personality and it can be substantially different from objective reality. 

Perception is affected by our personalities, our past experiences, and the context of the 

situation in which the perception is made. We also use Common Shortcuts in Judging Others. 

We use a number of shortcuts when we judge situations and others within those situations. 

This is a natural behavior born out of the human condition of evolutionary psychology. 

While shortcuts may be valid and helpful at times, they can also 

lead to significant distortions and biases. Common examples of these distortions such as 

the Fundamental Attribution Error, Halo/Hornes Effect, Contrast Effect, Stereotyping, 

Overconfidence Bias, and/or Anchoring Bias are discussed in the chapter. 

Additionally, there is a video in the module on examples of unconscious bias at work. 

Finally, let’ look at the Link Between Perception and Individual Decision Making 

While we are trained to make rational decisions following a step-by step process, 

we rarely make decisions this way. More often, we make decisions using 

Bounded Rationality and Intuition. Bounded Rationality is a decision-making 

process that constructs a simplified model of a problem complexity to help us make 

a decision. For example, when you decided to go to back to College and finish your degree, 

you literally had over a thousand options just inside the U.S. 

You had to quickly eliminate options and lower the consideration set of choices 

to a manageable set of sufficing options based on the parameters most important to 

you such as cost, convenience and location. Intuition is a process of using our distilled 

past experience to guide us in making a decision based on past favorable outcomes 

and decisions. We use our “gut”, it is less rational approach and often includes emotion. 

Finally, based on what we learned from shortcuts in judging others and individual perception, it’s 

easy to see how decision-making errors can occur. We can only overcome our biases and shortcuts in 

judging others once we recognize our own biases. Managers must strive to make better decisions by 

recognizing perceptual biases and decision-making errors. By combining rational analysis with 

intuition, manager’s and leaders can often improve their overall decision-making effectiveness.

Remember that we're talking about 

individual-level behavior still so that micro-level 

and our goal is to understand and predict 

individual behavior and organizational behavior, 

certainly in the context 

of the organizational environment. 

We're going to look today at personality 

and values and how personality and 

values do impact behavior at work. 

Personality is the sum total 

of ways in which an individual 

reacts and interacts with others, 

and we describe personality based on measurable traits. 

It's the lens that we use to understand 

and interpret our world. 

It is how we perceive the world around us, 

and then based off of that perception, 

then we choose to interact with the world. 

We use traits to better 

understand what the personality is, 

and traits are enduring characteristics that 

describe an individual's behavior. 

Those are the things that we can see 

consistently in someone's behavior. 

That is what a trait basically is. 

It's an enduring characteristic of somebody's behavior. 

When we say it's enduring, 

it exists in many environments 

and situations and in different times. 

We do see that there is a lot of heredity in terms 

of what our traits and personality are. 

That does not mean that our behavior is not 

influenced by our environment, it certainly is, 

but our personality seems to be more 

driven from our heredity and biological. 

How do we try to understand what 

a personality is and what 

frameworks do we use to understand that? 

Probably one that everybody is familiar 

with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. 

It's been used extensively in education, and in business. 

One of the reasons why it has 

value is because so many people know 

about this personality type indicator and have used it, 

had taken the task, 

and exposed to it in the world or that sort of thing. 

There are four characteristic continuums 

that classify people into 

16 different personality types based 

off the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. 

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator comes from 

the Jungian Personality Indicator, 

and then that's been further developed to become 

what we know today as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. 

There's these four continuums that are 

associated with the Myers-Briggs. 

There's the extroverted or introverted continuum. 

Extroverted individuals are outgoing, sociable, 

and assertive and introverts are quiet and shy. 

Then we have the sensing and intuitive dimension, 

and that is sensing types or 

practical prefer routine and order. 

They focus on details. 

Intuitives rely on conscious processes 

and look at the big picture. 

Then we had the intuited 

and the thinking and feeling dimension. 

Thinking types use reason and logic to handle problems, 

feeling types rely on their personal values and emotions. 

Then lastly, we have 

the judging and perceiving dimension, 

judging types one control before order, 

and structure perceiving types 

are flexible and spontaneous. 

Like I said, most of us have 

had experience with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, 

had taken the test, 

and have been given these four letters, 

[inaudible] INTJ, or ESTP. 

They've been able to determine that there are 

16 different personality types 

based off of this personality type indicator. 

Now, the reason why we bring it up here is 

because so many people have been exposed 

to it and it has been used in business 

extensively to put teams together to 

basically just understand that we may be very 

similar in terms of how we look and where 

we come from and how we've been educated, 

but we take this test and we realize that we're still 

very different in how we 

perceive and interact with the world. 

So there's definite value 

in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. 

But unfortunately, 

when we will dig into the research with the Myers-Briggs, 

we find that the results are unreliable. 

What do we mean by that? 

It doesn't have good test-retest reliability. 

You can take the test and get 

one score and then take the test that you're later get 

a different score and to take tests 

a year later and get a difference score. 

We know that personality is stable and pretty consistent. 

Usually that means that 

personality does change a little bit over time, 

but not as drastic as what we see 

with the Myers-Briggs type Indicator. 

That brings in the caves of how reliable is this tests. 

Part of it has to do with the fact that we're put 

into one of two categories. 

When in reality we exist on 

a continuum between extroverted or introverted. 

I think that is part of the problem 

with how the tests is designed, 

maybe in measures itself. 

Then research shows that it's also not 

related very well to job performance. 

Other words, we do see that people 

are attracted to certain types 

of positions based off of their personality. 

But your personality type does not 

impact your performance level 

in those different job types, 

so from that perspective, 

it doesn't give us a lot of value. 

Another personality dimension tests that 

does give us a lot of value and does seem to be 

more stable in terms of its reliability and validity 

is that Big 5 Personality Dimensions Model 

and that's often called OCEAN. 

There are five dimensions 

Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, 

Extroversion, Openness to Experience, 

and Agreeableness or conscientiousness. 

That's dimension is a measure of reliability. 

For Emotional Stability, this 

is dimension that taps a person 

whose ability to withstand stress. 

For Extroversion, that dimension captures 

our comfort level with relationships. 

Openness to experiments, 

that dimension addresses the range of 

a person's interests and their fascination with novelty. 

Then we have agreeableness, 

that dimension refers to an individual's propensity 

to defer to others. 

What we see with the recent research 

is that Conscientiousness and 

Agreeableness are the strongest predictors 

of job performance. 

If you go back to it, conscientiousness is dimension, 

that is a measure of reliability. 

Are you going to do what you say you're going to do? 

Indeed do that consistently, 

so that's why Conscientiousness seems to 

be the most related to job performance. 

What we do see that Agreeableness has a strong connection 

too but Agreeableness can also have a negative impact. 

On other words, if we're too agreeable, 

what happens is is that we don't 

tend to be promoted because of that 

and it's interesting and we'll see when 

we move here onto the dark triad, 

maybe there's a connection there between that. 

We also have what's called 

the dark triad in terms of personality. 

That's a machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopath. 

Basically machiavellianism 

is pragmatic emotional distance 

in the ends justifies the means personality type. 

Then we have the narcissism, 

it's a sense of entitlement, 

arrogance and grandiose sense of self. 

Then psychopathy, lack of empathy and remorse for others. 

What we'd see is that individuals to 

have these personality dimensions, 

especially machiavellianism and narcissism, 

tend to have more counter productive work behaviors. 

They exhibit more counterproductive work behaviors. 

But what's really interesting 

is that we do see that people who exhibit 

these behaviors tend to be often rewarded in 

organizations and are elevated 

to leadership positions within an organization. 

It's interesting that even though we don't view 

these personalities as being productive, 

certainly very individualistic and 

maybe in nature in our culture, 

especially here in the United States, 

which isn't individualist [inaudible] talk 

about a little bit later on. 

We do tend to reward people who act in 

these ways based off 

the personality traits and 

elevate them to leadership positions. 

There are some other personality measures 

that I think we should be aware of too. 

Core Self-Evaluation, those are conclusions 

about our capability, confidence, and self-worth. 

That has a lot to do with self-esteem and self-efficacy. 

Our belief in our global belief in ourself, 

and our abilities to 

perform when we are expected to do so. 

Also self-monitoring, the ability 

to adjust our behavior to situational factors. 

For stuff monitors, 

high self-monitors really care about what others 

feel and think about them 

so they adjust their behavior and 

low self-monitors don't care as much about 

that and don't tend to adjust their behaviors as much. 

Then we have proactive personality, 

those are people who identify opportunities, 

take action, and persevere through challenges. 

Certainly, we can see that people who are high in 

proactive personality are most likely to 

act and to see an issue and then do something about it. 

Obviously people like that tend to do well in business, 

and are more of entrepreneurial in nature. 

We do know that there are 

mitigating variables to personality, 

so we do have a couple of 

theories that help us to understand that. 

I said to you before that your personality 

is more biological and based on genetics, 

but it doesn't mean that 

situations and environments can't mitigate our behavior. 

This situation strength theory tells us that 

personality traits translate into behavior, 

depends on strength and the norms, cues, 

and standards that dictate behavior. 

In other words, we know that culture has 

a lot to do with our behavior too, 

and that we tend to exhibit behavior, 

especially in environments, that have strong norms, 

cues, and standards of behavior. 

We can mitigate or lower 

the propensity of behavior occurring 

based off the situation strength theory, 

then we have the opposite of that, 

the trait activation theory saying, hey, 

certain situations can actually 

activate certain traits and behaviors. 

Again, we do know that the environment does work in 

collaboration with our personality 

to mitigate our behavior. 

Then, let's look at values and what are values? 

Those are basic convictions 

that specific modes of conduct 

are personally, or socially preferable. 

How does that affect our behaviors? 

We have value systems. 

In other words, we don't just have one value, 

we have a series of 

values that we put together to create a value system. 

What that means is that all of 

our values are as important to us, 

and have so much impact on our behavior, 

and certain values take 

greater importance in terms of our behavior. 

We have two different basic types of values. 

We have terminal values, 

those are desirable end-state of existence, 

then instrumental values, those are modes 

of behavior to achieve those terminal values. 

For example, if you have a terminal value 

of social justice and 

social justice is very important to us, 

and then instrumental values is what 

behaviors are you willing to participate 

in to get that desired in state of social justice. 

Maybe if you are a proactive personality type, 

you might be more likely to participate 

in behaviors that would lead to, 

and actually lead social justice movements as an example, 

so just a relevant 

point that we can use to understand here today. 

How do we link personality and values to the workplace? 

That is ultimately our goal here. 

There are some theories that do 

help us to get a little bit of 

a better understanding of that. 

Basically, they fall into two camps. 

That's the person job fit camp, 

and a personal organization fit setup theories. 

If we're looking at personality job fit, 

we have to look at Holland's six personality types 

and fit to job types. 

When we look at Holland's theory, 

we have six different types. 

We have the realistic investigated, 

the social, the conventional, 

the enterprising, and the artistic. 

What Holland's research has showed us is 

that it actually is a pretty good predictor of, 

when people take this test, 

Play video starting at :13:31 and follow transcript

your top two personality traits are ranked. 

Then it tells you what occupations are the 

most likely to be a good fit for you. 

What we do see is that there is some correlation between 

Holland's personality types and 

how people perform in those different jobs. 

We can see again, 

relationship between someone's personality 

and maybe the types of jobs that they would 

be best in and could perform the best in. 

Then we have the other side of that, 

which is the person-organization fit. 

That is, people are attracted to and selected 

by organizations with similar values. 

We especially see, today I think, 

arguments from both of these. 

If you look at how companies hire, 

they use both of these dimensions, 

they definitely look at person-job fit and 

give different tests and stuff to assess whether or 

not someone has the type of personality and 

a set of values that are going to be this successful, 

hopefully, in this type of job. 

Then we also have today especially younger generations. 

People really being in organizations, 

younger organizations to being 

focused on bringing people into the organization who 

have a similar set of values 

and people wanting to work for 

organizations that have a similar set of 

values and that they're more likely to be 

comfortable and successful in 

an organization that has a similar set of values. 

In other words, it's not just that the person can do 

the job and that's important for 

the person job fit on perspective, 

but also they'll fit well into 

the environment and with others in that same environment, 

so we find that both those dimensions are very important. 

Then last but certainly not least for today, 

we also would be remiss if we did not talk about 

international cultural values and 

differences. Why is this important? 

We have this little bit the same that was 

sometimes using our organizational behavior. 

That is the cultural values or 

country values values eat corporate values for lunch. 

What do I mean by that? 

Basically just means is that we have 

found that our country cultures, 

where we grow up, 

the countries that we grow up in too 

have a lot of impact on our behavior 

and the values that we develop from 

those cultures that we grow up in. 

That country culture is actually stronger than 

corporate culture in terms of 

determining someone's behavior at work. 

What that means is that, 

corporations actually are forced to adjust 

their cultures to hire 

people and have operations in other countries. 

The two frameworks that we're most familiar with here are 

Hofstede's framework and the GLOBE framework 

that build on Hofstede's framework. 

Hofstede's framework is based 

off these five value dimensions. 

For example, power distance 

that describes the degree to which people in 

a country accept that power in 

institutions is distributed unequally. 

Our ability to accept that power in 

institutions and organizations is actually 

distributed unequally that would be power distance. 

Then we have individualism versus collectivism. 

Lot of people know that because obviously in 

the United States we have an individualistic culture 

and China, 

for example, that's more of a collectivist culture. 

So individualism is the degree to 

which people prefer to act as 

individuals rather than members of groups 

and believe in individuals rights above all else, 

collectivism emphasizes a tight social framework 

which people accept others and 

groups [inaudible] to look after them and protect then. 

We also have masculinity and femininity, 

uncertainty avoidance in long-term 

versus short term orientation. 

I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about these. 

These are very important 

and my lack of talking about them 

does not mean that they're not important and they 

certainly are based off what I just said before. 

It's just a lot to go over in this chapter. 

I don't want to spend too much time to go to the because 

that's the goal to try to keep these around 15 minutes. 

The GLOBE framework is important because 

it built on Hofstede's framework. 

I'll validate how Hofstede's framework and found that 

those five dimensions do exist in their research. 

I actually found four additional dimension 

that were added to 

Hofstede's work and found that there are maybe 

a total nine different cultural value dimensions 

that we should be aware of. 

As managers and leaders, 

we need to be aware of the fact that, hey, 

all of us have different personalities 

and those personalities do affect how 

we view and judge the world around us and 

perceive that world and then interact with that world. 

Then our behaviors are mitigated by things 

like whether or not we want to 

adjust those behaviors based off of how 

important it is to us to be perceived in 

a certain way or to be member of a group. 

That's basically what we need to understand 

about personalities and values, 

is that we have 

our personalities that do 

impact how we view and interact with the world. 

We do have values that also impact that. 

Then basically in the environments 

that we set up that work, 

those can either mitigate or reinforce 

those different personality dimensions 

within individuals. 

That can help us to better understand how people 

will act in the workplace. 

Again, hopefully predict and 

understand behavior. Thanks, take care.