Personality

Management Concepts Compendium

Personality


Personality is interpreted by Fred Luthans in his textbook as sum of ‘how people affect others’, ‘how they understand and view themselves’ ‘their patterns of inner outer measurable traits’ and ‘their person-situation interaction’.

People’s attempts to understand themselves are called the self-concept in personality theory. The self is a product of many interacting parts. Some of them are self-esteem, multiple intelligences, emotion, optimism and efficacy.

Five-factor model of personality traits

In an article “Personality structure: Emergence of the Five-Factor Model,” published in Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 41, 1990, Digman identified five personality traits as having significance for performance in the workplace.

They are:

1. Conscientiousness
2. Emotional stability
3. Agreeableness
4. Extraversion
5. Openness to experience

If groups rather than individuals are more important in organizational performance, do these traits have any relevance? It is interesting to note that a recent study found that the higher the average scores of team members on these traits, the better their teams performed.

Myers-Briggs Type Personality Indicator (MBTI)

MBTI is widely used in real world career counseling, team building, conflict management and analyzing management styles. The theory underlying this indicator was originated by Carl Jung. Katharin Briggs and Isable Briggs-Myers developed a 100-item personality test to categorise people into four pairs of traits yielding 16 distinctive types.
They are

Extraversion (E) ---- Introversion (I)
Judging (J) ------ Perceiving (P)
Sensing (S) ------ Intuiting (I)
Thinking (T) ------ Feeling (F)

Different careers are identified as suitable for different personalities.

For example ESTJ personality type extraverted, sensing, thinking and judging.
This type likes to interact with others, sees the world realistically, makes decisions objectively and like structure, schedules, and order, this would be a manager type.




Some more reference papers on Five factor model

M. Zucckerman, D.M.Kuhlman, J.Joireman, P.Teta and M. Kraft, “A Comparison of Three Structural Models for Personality: The Big three, The Big Five, and the Alternative Five,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, October 1993, pp. 757-768.

Gregory M. Hurtz and John J. Donovan, “Personality and Job Performance: The Big Five Revisited,” Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 85, No. 6, 2000, pp. 869-879.

M.R. Barrick, G.L. Stewart, M.J. Neubert and M.K. Mount, “Relating Member Ability and Personality to Work-Team Processes and Team Effectiveness,” Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 83, 1998, pp. 377-391.