What is Personality?

What is Personality?
Personality is the sum total of the ways in which an individual reacts to and interacts with others. It is most often described in terms of measurable traits that a person exhibits.

Personality Determinants
An adult’s personality is generally considered to be made up both hereditary and environmental factors, moderated by situational conditions.

Heredity Heredity refers to those factors that were determined at conception. Physical stature, facial attractiveness gender, temperament, muscle composition, and reflexes, energy level, and biological rhythms are characteristics that are generally considered to be either completely or substantially influenced by who your parents were, that is, by their biological, physiological, and inherent psychological make up.

Tree different streams of research lend some credibility to the argument that heredity plays an important part in determining an individual personality. The first look at the genetic underpinning of human behavior and temperament among young children. The second address the study of twins who were separated at birth. The third examines the consistency in job satisfaction over time and across situation.

Environment Among the factors that exert pressures on our personality formation are the culture in which we are raised, our early conditioning, the norms among our family, friends, and social groups, and other influences that we experience. The environment which we are exposed plays substantial role in shaping our personality.

For example, culture establishes the norms, attitudes, and values that are passed along from the generation to the next and create consistencies over time.

Situation A third factor, the situation, influences the effects of heredity and environment on personality. An individual’s personality, although generally stable and consistent, does change in different situations.

It seems only logical to suppose that situations will influence an individual's personality, but a neat classification scheme that would tell us the impact of various types of situations has so far eluded us. Apparently we are not yet close to the developing a system for clarifying situations so they might be systematically studied. How ever we do know that certain situations are more relevant than others in influencing personality.

Personality Traits
The early work on the structure of personality revolved around attempts to identify and label enduring characteristics that describes an individual behavior. Popular characteristics include shyness, aggressiveness, submissiveness, laziness, ambition, loyalty, and timidity. These characteristics, when they are exhibited in a large number of situations, are called personality traits.

In the recent years, an impressive body of research supports that five basic dimensions underlie all others and encompass most of the significant variation in human personality.

1. Extraversion This dimension captures one's comfort level with relationship. Extraverts tend to be gregarious, assertive, and sociable. Introverts tend to be reserved, timid, and quiet.
2. Agreeableness This dimension refers to an individual's propensity to defer to others. Highly agreeable people are cooperative, war, and trusting. People who score low in agreeableness are cold, disagreeable, and antagonistic.
3. Conscientiousness This dimension is a measure of reliability. A highly conscious person is responsible, organized, dependable, and persistent. Those who score low in this dimension are easily distracted, disorganized, and unreliable.
4. Emotional stability This dimension taps a person's ability to withstand stress. People with positive emotional stability tend to be calm, self-confident, and secure. Those with highly negative scores tend to be nervous, anxious, depressed, and insecure.
5. Openness to experience The final dimension addresses an individual's range of interest and fascination with novelty. Extremely open people are creative, curious, and artistically sensitive. Those at the other end of the openness category are conventional and find comfort in the familiar.

Major personality attributes
We want to evaluate more carefully specific personality attributes that have been found to be powerful predictors of behavior in organizations. The first is related to where a person perceives the locus of control, self-steem, self monitoring, and propensity for risk taking.

Locus of control some people believe that they are masters of their own fate. Other people see themselves as pawns of fate, believing that what happens to them in their lives is due to luck and chance. the first type who believe that they control their destinies, have been labeled internals, whereas the later, who see their lives as being controlled by outside forces, have been called externals. A person's perception of the source of his or her fate is turned locus of control.
a large amount of research comparing internals with externals has consistently shown that individuals who have high scores in externality are less satisfied with their job, have higher absenteeism rates, are more alienated from the work setting, and are less involved on their jobs than are internals.
The overall evidence indicates that internals generally perform better on their jobs, but that conclusion should be moderated to reflect differences in jobs. Internals search more effectively for information before making decision, are more motivated to achieve, and make a greater attempt to control their environment. Externals, however, are more complaint and willing to follow directions.

Self-steem people differ in the degree to which they like or dislike themselves. This trait is called self-steem. Self-steem, is directly related to expectation for success. High SEs believe that they possess the ability they need in order to succeed at work.
Individuals with high self-steem will take more risks in job selection and are more likely to choose unconventional jobs than people with low self-steem. The most generalizable finding on self-steem is that low SEs are more susceptible to external influence than are high SEs. Low SEs dependon the receipt of positive evaluation from others. As a result, they are more likely to seek approval from others and more prone to conform to the beliefs and behavior of those they respect than are high SEs.

Self-monitoring it refers to an individual's ability to adjust his or her behavior to external, situational factors.
Individuals with high in self-monitoring show considerable adaptability in adjusting their behavior to external situational factors. They are highly sensitive to external cues and can behave differently in different situations. High self-monitors are capable of presenting sticking contradictions between their public persona and their private self. Low self-monitors can't disguise themselves in that way. They need to display their true dispositions and attitudes in every situation; hence, there is high behavioral consistency between who they are and what they do.

Risk taking people differ in their willingness to take chances. This propensity to assume or avoid risk has been shown to have an impact on how long it takes managers to make a decision and how much information they require before making their choice. High risk taking managers make more rapid decisions and use less information in making their choices than do low risk-taking managers.

Personality and National Culture
Do personality frameworks, transfer across cultures? The personality factors identified appear in almost all cross-cultural studies. There are no common personality types for a given country. You can, for instance, find high and low risk takers in almost any culture. Yet a country culture influences the dominant personality characteristics of its population.

Achieving Personality Fit
Twenty years ago, organizations were concerned with personality primarily because they wanted to match individuals to specific jobs. That concern still exists. But, in recent years, interest has expanded to include the individual- organization fit. Why? Because managers today are less interested in applicant’s ability to perform a specific job than with his or her flexibility to meet changing situations.

The Person-Job Fit
In the discussion of personality attributes, our conclusion were often qualified or recognize that the requirements of job moderated the relationship between possession of the personality characteristic and job performance.

The Person Organization Fit
As previously noted, attention in recent years has expanded to include matching people to organizations as well as jobs. To the degree that an organization faces a dynamic and changing environment and requires employees who are able to readily change tasks and move fluidly between teams, it’s probably more important that employees, personalities fit with overall organization’s culture than with the characteristics of any specific jobs.

The person-organization fit essentially argues that people leave jobs that are not compatible with their personality. Using the big five terminology, for instance, we could expect that people high in extraversion fit better with aggressive and team-oriented cultures; people high on agreeableness will match up with supportive organizational climate than one that focuses on aggressiveness; and that people high on openness to experience fit into organizations that emphasize innovation rather than standardization.