Agreeable Personality in Work Place - Essay Example

? Agreeable Personality in Work Place Essay 1650 Words College Agreeable Personality in Work Place The role of management in a business system is to control, direct and monitor the utilization of the scarce business resources that are core to the development of the organization. Workers form one of the scarcest yet vital resources that must be effectively harnessed to optimize its benefits to the organizational development. Of more significance is the employee behaviour and character and its contribution to the sustenance of the firm. In a real work environment, employees have unique character traits that in one way of the other influence teamwork, cooperation, innovation and problem solving abilities that affect their adaptation to the work environment. Management of organizational behaviour has identified five giant characters that including openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism (OCEAN), all which contribute to the development of the organization. However, they have recognized that all these characters have their dark and light side to the organization. Agreeableness, just like any other organizational behaviour, has its positive and negative sides to the firm. All in all, organizations should strive to obtain employees with the highest level of agreeableness. Agreeableness is a trait that has generated mixed reactions among many organizational behaviour analysts with some expressing a high regard for it and other pin pointing the weaknesses of this trait. Slocum and Hellriegell defined agreeableness as the virtue of an employee to be warm, tactful, cooperative, tolerable and humble and portraying minimal coldness and rudeness1. In the general, these traits are advantageous to an organization although at times they are accompanied by elements that may be consequential to organizations. 1D., Hellriegel, and W. Slocum, Organizational Behaviour. Mason, OH, South-Western Cengage Learning. 2009. P. 45 The advocates of this trait argue that agreeableness is the source of harmony, peace, excellent team work, accommodating leadership and loyalty in a business system. On the other hand, critics have criticized this trait on the ground that employees with these traits show weakness in exercising confidence, criticizing wrong organization behaviour and conflict resolution in times that demand critical decision making. Teamwork is one of the valuable elements of an organization that binds employees to the collective goals and objectives of an organization that define its end task. Team work ensures that employees remain cohesive and cooperative during the project implementation process to execute all the designated roles. An agreeable person is friendly, sociable and warm while associating with their colleagues in the organization2. Consequently, an agreeable person will find it easy to get along with the other employees and will form part of a concrete team that will ensure a smooth progress of the business operations, hence the success of the organization. For instance, an agreeable person will avoid conflicts that arise during the period of work preferring peaceful situations rather than aggravating the conflicting. Conflicts are sources of tensions in the workplace, which slows the progress of the work and misaligns the employees from the organizational goals. From this point of view, the ability of management to select agreeable employees will form part of the role of team building. In leadership, agreeable people create a conducive work environment that motivates employees to remain active and focussed in their duties in the organization. Competent leaders have a role to maintain a peaceful working environment by engaging employees in a constructive exchange of ideas. 2A., Neal, G., Yeo, A. Koy, T. and Xiao. Predicting the Form and Direction of Work Role Performance from the Big 5 Model of Personality Traits. Journal or Organizational Behaviour, vol. 33 , 2012. Pp. 175-192 Agreeable persons will encourage employees to contribute and raise their concerns more confident, which in turn allows them to feel part and parcel of the business operations. Additionally, agreeable persons will handle management issues more calmly and will portray little harshness towards the employees3. As a result, they will be able to win the trust and loyalty from employees, eliciting their cooperation that is vital in maintaining calmness among employees. Also, agreeable leaders will make a smooth link between the grounds people and the top level management by passing the top level management decisions to the operational team in the most inoffensive manner. In essence, selecting an agreeable person will ensure that the communication chain in an organization is smooth and that junior employees have a channel to express their ideas and opinions regarding the organization. The other positive aspect of an agreeable person is their considerate nature that binds them with a willingness to help others in the work place. Workers attitude determines their response to voluntary services especially in times of need during emergency situations. For instance, when there are emergency situations in organizations, workers are often required to work beyond their working hours or to provide extra services other than those in their official duties list. Agreeable persons will do everything they can to assist other employees to recover from their shock or difficult situations or even organizations to avoid any situations that may hurt the organization's progress. Being considerate, they will strive not to inflict pain on other employees or cause damage to the organizations. They will respond to emergency situations promptly when required to ensure that the organization does not suffer any consequential loss. This means the human resource management will create a potential business asset by recruiting agreeable persons for their organization. 3Ibid, p. 178 Critics of this giant character in organizational behaviour have pinpointed various weaknesses that come along the good traits of an agreeable person. Langan et al pointed out that every positive personality has its own dark side that has negative consequences in the organization4. After an empirical research, these scholars identified that people with an agreeable personality exhibit weakness in problem solving skills, a core element of strong leadership in management. Organizations are prone to situations that demand urgency and need to be handled more sensitively to salvage a delicate situation. On these occasions, the leader is expected to take a quick approach to solving the problem by engaging their critical decision making abilities. The finding of this research showed that agreeable persons will find difficulty in making decisions that may end up hurting some people in the organization even if the situation demands so. Their considerate nature forbids them from taking any steps that are likely to hurt their colleagues, which at times is necessary during times of urgency. Consequently, agreeable employees will fail to salvage delicate situations, but may end up hurting the business. Recruiting agreeable people, to some extent will render the organization vulnerable to consequences of emergent situations. The agreeable people have a difficulty in handling sensitive matters especially while mediating between the top level management and the operational team in an organization. While they are willing to help every member of the team, they have a tendency to avoid situations that may create a conflict between their colleagues5. 4 J., Langan-Fox, L., Cooper, & R. Klimoski. Research companion to the dysfunctional Workplace management challenges and symptoms. Cheltenham, UK, Edward Elgar. 2007. P. 332 5 G. Mitchell, R. Rothstein, and D. Goffin, The use of personality measures in personnel Selection: What does current research support? Essential Human Resource Management Review, vol. 16, 2006. Pp. 155-180 Take for instance when the ground people are proposing for a salary increment or provision of allowances during harsh economic times. They are likely to pass their pleas to their leader as the intermediate person who connects them to the human resource management. While an agreeable leader will be sympathetic of the employees’ situation, they will fear to trigger a possible conflict with the management who are likely to have a different opinion on salary increment. Resultantly, the employees might feel that their grievances are not attended resorting to a go slow or even a riot in the organization. Inability of the agreeable leader to solve conflicts in situations of dilemmas may cost the organization more than anticipated. Promoting an agreeable person to a leadership cadre will pose a barrier to the communication between junior employees and senior management in organizations. Langan, however, points out that having disagreeable employees in an organization is the worst drawback for an organization. Disagreeable employees are likely to be a nuisance to the operations of an organization from all the dimensions of an effective workforce6. First, disagreeable employees will threaten the cohesive force of team work by providing opinions that conflict with the management goals. For instance, a disagreeable person in a leadership position will often differ with the management decisions and are likely to influence some employees to follow his own decision, hence creating conflicts between employees. These differences are likely to trigger heated unconstructive debates that might culminate to employees’ strikes that have negative impacts on the organization. From this point of view, each personality has its bad and good impacts on the organizations. The human resources in their staffing roles should target potential employees that have a balanced personality. 6 J., Langan-Fox, L., Cooper, & R. Klimoski. Research companion to the dysfunctional Workplace management challenges and symptoms. Cheltenham, UK, Edward Elgar. 2007. P. 332 For instance an employee who has a personality of agreeableness and openness is likely to be both creative while making management decisions as well as effective in team building. The implication of this is that the human resource management select a team that has optimal personalities to take advantage of the positive attributes and neutralise the dark shadows on these attributes. In short, human resource managers should target employees with agreeable personalities while selecting workers for their organizations. The employees will way far in developing teamwork, creating a conducive work environment and responding to emergency situations in the business system, as opposed to disagreeable persons. However, they should be aware of the dangers associated with such a selection process especially when they mediate between the junior and senior employees in an organization. Their considerate nature bars them from making decisions or moves that will hurt or create conflict within a team. It would be wise for the management to ensure that all employees score high not only in terms of their agreeable personality but all the other features of the OCEAN model. However, weighing between disagreeable employees and agreeable ones shows that agreeable employees are more beneficial to organizational development. Bibliography Hellriegel, D., & Slocum, J. W. Organizational Behaviour. Mason, OH, South-Western Cengage Learning. 2009. P. 45 Langan-Fox, J., Cooper, L., & Klimoski, R. Research companion to the dysfunctional Workplace management challenges and symptoms. Cheltenham, UK, Edward Elgar. 2007. P. 332 Mitchell G., Rothstein, R. and Goffin, D. The use of personality measures in personnel Selection: What does current research support? Essential Human Resource Management Review, Vol 16, 2006. Pp. 155-180 Neal, A., Yeo, G., Koy, A. and Xiao, T. Predicting the Form and Direction of Work Role Performance from the Big 5 Model of Personality Traits. Journal or Organizational Behaviour, Vol 33, 2012. Pp. 175-192 Read More