The Role of Individual Differences in the Workplace - Essay Example

People in Organizations Introduction In day-to-day interaction with others, whether at home or in the office, it is most unlikely that you will seek to influence the different people that you encounter in exactly the same way. At home, you will take one approach with your mother or father; whereas at work, your tactic with your manager will be different from the one that you use with your colleague. In the latter case, the reason for the difference is only partly due to seniority, one of them being your boss, the other being a fellow employee. You also probably modify your approach because you perceive your mother, boyfriend, boss and colleague to be different kinds of people. We are all amateur psychologists, and the most successful influencers are able to assess accurately their target influencees, and adapt their influencing messages to suit them. Such adjustments lead to the creation of influencer-influencee rapport. The conversation of people who are in rapport flows, and both their body movements and their words become synchronized with each other. The recommendation to match the influencee so as to create rapport is itself based on the even broader notion of liking. This says that we like people like ourselves and, in consequence, will be more willing to comply with their requests (Aguinis, & Henle, 2001),. Personality and Classification Not only do we know that people are different, but we also know that they are predictably different. Indeed, we spend a great deal of our time classifying them into broad types, and explaining the differences between the types. Every popular newspaper contains an astrological section which implies that Capricorns behave in one way and that Scorpios act in another. The twelve signs of the Zodiac represent one attempt at classifying people into personality types based on the time of the year in which they were born. How accurate or useful are they Historically, many attempts have been made to classify people according to their personalities. The Greek physician, Hippocrates, offered the temperaments model of personality. He believed that there were four basic personalities or temperaments - melancholic, choleric, sanguine and phlegmatic. In his view, each was determined by the amount and type of bile and phlegm that people possessed in their bodies (Aguinis, & Henle, 2001). Distinguishing Between Personality Types If you are to select a particular influencing approach on the basis of your target influencee's personality, then the personality framework employed has to be both easy to understand and simple to use. You need to be able to divide people into a very limited number of personality types or classes, based on the personality traits that they possess. In modern times, Carl Gustav Jung was the first to observe that people's behavior, rather than being individually unique, fitted into patterns, and that many of the seemingly random differences in human behavior were actually ordered and consistent (Lambert, 1996). It is obvious that any attempt to reduce personality into only four categories inevitably ignores the subtlety of human differences. On the other hand, anything more complex is unusable by an influencer. For this reason, in using these four personality stereotypes, one is inevitably trading accuracy off against ease of use. The framework does allow you to classify the individual whom you may wish to influence in a simple way using your observation of their behavior and the examination of their created work or home environment. Such information can then be immediately put into practice. Personality Testing One obvious way to understand the relationship of individual differences to work-related behavior is to examine the applied literature on personality testing in the workplace. Psychological tests, attempting to measure individual differences related to occupational behaviors, have been used for over 60 years, and there now exist nearly 80,000 occupational-related tests. Both world wars, particularly the second, were particularly important for the 'testing business' and most armed services are still active users of psychological tests for selection and training. In 1869, Galton expressed an interest in intelligence testing with his book Hereditary Genius, which presented a classification scheme based on abilities. Wundt in the 1870s began using reaction time measures and tests of visual and auditory acuity as indexes of intelligence. This effort was greatly advanced by Binet at the turn of the century, because he reconceptualized intelligence as consisting of more complex mental processes than had Wundt and, accordingly, developed tests of memory, attention, comprehension and imagination. Munsterberg in 1913 brought this fledgling movement into the industrial context in general and employee selection in particular, by using a battery of tests available at the time to help select motormen for the Boston Railway Company (Kramer & Neale, 1998). Psychological testing has blossomed fully since that early era, to gain a place not only in industry, but also educational, clinical and counseling settings. Its greatest boost for selection purposes came during World War I. Under the leadership of many of these early pioneers, 1,726,966 men were tested as a part of the war effort. In the period since these beginnings, the numbers and types of psychological tests employed in industry have expanded greatly. In a large, national survey done by the American Society for Personnel Administration in 1975, it was reported that approximately 60% of employers with over 25,000 employees and 40% of those with less than 100 employees used psychological tests. Recent work shows that nearly 20% of French and 10% of British companies use psychological tests (Gray, J. and Starke, F.A. 1984). Personality tests and, to a lesser extent, ability tests have both their critics and enthusiasts. The former dismiss them as useless while the latter embrace them as of crucial importance. Set of Arguments Placed For and Against Personality Testing at Workplace The Personality Tests provide numeric information, which means that individuals can be more easily compared on the same criteria. In interviews, different questions are asked of different candidates, and the answers often forgotten. Tests provide comparable profiles. With data-based records, one can trace a person's development over time. In fact, by going back to test results kept in a person's file one can actually see if, and by how much, the tests were predictive of occupational success. Tests give explicit and specific results on temperament and ability rather than vague, ambiguous, coded platitudes that are so often found in references. A percentage or a sten score (provided of course that it is valid) makes for much clearer thinking about personal characteristics than terms like satisfactory, sufficient or high-flyer. Good norms demonstrate a candidate's relative scores. Tests are fair because they eliminate corruption, favoritism. That is, if a person does not have the ability or a 'dangerous' profile, they will not be chosen irrespective of their other 'assets'. Tests are comprehensive in that they cover all of the basic dimensions of personality and ability from which other occupational behavior patterns derive. A good test battery can give a complete picture of individual functioning. They are scientific in that they are soundly empirically based on proven theoretical foundations-that is, they are reliable, valid and able to discriminate the good from the mediocre, and the average from the bad. Tests increase the behavioral conceptual language of those that use them. This gives those who are not trained in personality theory a very useful set of concepts that they can use to identify and distinguish human characteristics in the workplace. Empirical data resulting from the tests can be used to settle empirical arguments. That is, objective numbers provide the sort of clear evidence to justify decisions. Tests give testers and testees alike, interesting and powerful insights into their own beliefs and behaviors. They might also be used to explain to candidates why they have been rejected. (Furnham, 1999) The Personality Tests have numerous of its advantages, while there are a lot of things which goes against it too. Many of these tests are fakeable-that is, people like to describe themselves in a positive light and receive a 'desirable' score so that they may be accepted. Yet this faking in a way reflects their 'real' personality. Some tests have lie scores to attempt to overcome this. The effects of this distortion are, however, not major. Some people do not have sufficient self-insight to report on their own feelings and behavior-that is, it is not that people lie but that they cannot, rather than will not, give accurate answers about themselves. Tests are unreliable in that all sorts of temporary factors-test anxiety, boredom, weariness, a headache, period pains-lead people to give different answers on different occasions. Although this is partly true, this factor only makes a small difference. Most importantly, tests are invalid-they do not measure what they say they are measuring and these scores do not predict behavior over time. For many tests, this is indeed the Achilles heel and they are lamentably short of robust proof of their validity. It is supremely important that tests have predictive and construct validity. They might be able to measure all sorts of dimensions of behavior but not the crucial ones to the organization, like trustworthiness and likelihood of absenteeism. Buying personality tests is like having a set menu, but what many managers want is an -la-carte menu where they can select only what they want (Drummond, 1991). People have to be sufficiently literate or articulate to do these tests, not to mention sufficiently familiar with North American jargon. Many organizations therefore believe that their work force could not do them properly, they would take up too much time, or they would cause needless embarrassment. There are no good norms, at least for the populations they want to test, and comparing them to American students (Caucasian sophomores) is dangerously misleading. The tests are unfair, and biased to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPS), hence white males tend to do better or get a more attractive profile, and therefore get selected, than say black females. They therefore fly in the face of antidiscriminatory legislation. Freedom of information legislation may mean that candidates would be able to see and hence challenge the scores themselves, their interpretation or the decisions made on them. The less objective the recorded data the better for those unprepared to give negative feedback. As (ability and personality) tests become well known, people could buy copies and practice so that they know the correct or most desirable answers. This happens extensively with General Measure Aptitude Tests (GMATs), and results could be seen to do more with preparation and practice than actual ability (Furnham, 1999). Conclusion The balkanization of the discipline of psychology has meant that various branches have had progressively less and less contact with one another. Personality psychology and organizational behavior are good examples. Whereas few personality and individual difference theorists have paid much attention to the role of personality differences in work productivity, satisfaction and motivation, so few researchers in organizational behavior in turn have done more than acknowledge personality traits in occupational behavior. Some would agree that 'organizational behavior' as a field of study has done little more than acknowledge personality factors, although it may have done more to look at other individual differences (in terms of preferences, values, beliefs). This is perhaps not surprising, as the sociological-organizational perspective arose in part as a reaction to an over-emphasis on the individual as the unit of analysis in occupational psychology. Indeed, sociologists still argue that much of the literature in the field of occupational psychology is dominated by individual difference literature. Organizational behavior tends to have very strong points of affinity with the social psychology of organizations, but with a more managerial and applied focus; this is scarcely surprising as the majority of organizational behavior practitioners are trained psychologists. Organization theory is largely concerned with organizations as objects of study. It is much more concerned with the nature and source of organizational structures, power in organizations, the role of the environment etc. Like organizational behavior, the field of organization theory derives from a business school context, but the former tends to be found more frequently than the latter. Of course, there are areas in which the two streams of thought and research converge, such as when researchers focus on the effects of attributes of organizational structure on individuals' work experiences. However, the two strands are distinct in researchers' minds. However, outside the academic world, managers in the workplace have begun not only to acknowledge the great importance of individual differences, but also to seek out, in ever-increasing numbers, consultants who 'profile' or test people in assessment centers in order to determine their strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, many of the consultants use tests and methods of poor psychometric quality and make invalid claims for their tests (Furnham, 1999). Reference Aguinis, H. and Henle, C.A. (2001), 'Effects of Nonverbal Behavior on Perceptions of a Female Employee's Power bases', Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 141, no. 4. Adrian Furnham, 1999. Personality at Work: The Role of Individual Differences in the Workplace. Routledge. Drummond, H. 1991, and Effective Decision Making: A Practical Guide, London: Kogan Page. Gray, J. and Starke, F.A. 1984, Organizational Behavior: Concepts and Applications, Columbus, OH: Merrill Publishing Kramer, R.M and Neale, M.A. (eds). (1998), Power and Influence in Organizations, London: Sage Lambert, T. (1996), The Power of Influence, London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing Read More