Tuesday, 13 January 2015

Major personality attributes influencing OB:

Major personality attributes influencing OB:

  • Powerful predictors of behavior in organization
  • Locus of control, Machiavellianism, self-esteem, self-monitoring, risk taking, type A-B personality, proactive personality.

Locus of Control:

  • Internals: Masters of their own fate. Control their defines.
  • Externals: What happen to them is due to luck or chance, their lives as being controlled by outside forces.
  • A person’s perception of the source of his or her fate in termed as locus of control.

Machiavellianism:

  • I am prepared to do whatever I have to do to get ahead.
  • Niccole Machiavelli, how to gain and use power.
  • High Mach: pragmatic, maintain emotion distance, believes that end can be justify means.
  • Use it- if it works
  • High Mach: manipulate more, win more
  • High Mach flourish:
    • Face to face interaction
    • Min. rules and regulations
    • Emotional involvement is low
  • High Mach: negotiation, sales, commissioned job.
  • Low Mach: absolute, standard.

Self Esteem:

  • People differ in the degree to which they like or dislike themselves.
  • This trait is called as self-esteem.
  • Self-esteem is directly related to expectations for success.
  • High SE believes that they possess the ability they need to succeed at work.

Self-Monitoring:

  • 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.
  • Behave different in different situations
  • Contradiction between their personality in public and their private self.
  • Low self-monitoring: true attitude in every situation, high behavioral consistency between who they are and what they do?

Risk taking:

  • People differ in their willingness to take chances.
  • How long it takes managers to make a decision
  • How much information they require.
  • High risk taking managers: rapid decision, less information required.
  • 79 mangers, simulated exercises for hiring decision.
  • Decision accuracy was the same for the both group.

Type A personality:

A person with type A personality is “aggressively involved in a chronic, incessant (non-stop, continuous) struggle to achieve more and more in less and less time, and if required to do so, against the opposing efforts of other things or other persons.

Type A’s:

  • Are always moving, walking and eating rapidly.
  • Feel impatient with the rate at which most event take place
  • Strive to think or do two or more things at once
  • Cannot cope with leisure time
  • Are obsessed with numbers, measuring their success in terms of how many or how much of everything they acquire.

Type B’s:

  • Never suffer from a sense of time urgency with its accompanying impatience.
  • Feel no need to display or discuss either their achievements or accomplishments unless such exposure is demanded by the situation
  • Play for fun and relaxation, rather than to exhibit their superiority at any cost
  • Can relax without guilt.

Type A’s:
  • High level of stress, continue time pressure, creating deadlines
  • Fast workers, quantity emphasis
  • Type A perform better in job interview
  • Have desirable traits high drives, competence, aggressiveness, success.

Proactive personality:

  • Actively take initiative
  • To improve their current circumstances or crate new ones
  • Others sit by passively reacting to situations
  • Proactive personality: people who identify opportunities, show initiatives, take actions and persevere (continue, persists) until meaningful change occurs.
  • Leaders, change agents
  • Entrepreneurial initiative
  • Challenges the status quo (existing affairs)
  • Displeasure when situation are not to their liking


 (Ref: Organization Behavior- S.P.Robbins) 

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