Chapter Overview of Personality and Emotions

Personality

Personality is a dynamic concept describing the growth and development of a person’s whole psychological system. Personality looks at some aggregate whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. Personality is the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his unique adjustments to his environment. Personality is the sum total of 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.

A review of the personality literature offers general guidelines that can lead to effective job performance. As such, it can improve hiring, transfer, and promotion decisions. Because personality characteristics create the parameters for people’s behavior, they give us a framework for predicting behavior. For example, individuals who are shy, introverted, and uncomfortable in social situations would probably be ill-suited as salespeople. Individuals who are submissive and conforming might not be effective as advertising “idea” people.

Can we predict which people will be high performers in sales, research, or assembly-line work on the basis of their personality characteristics alone? The answer is no. Personality assessment should be used in conjunction with other information such as skills, abilities, and experience. However, knowledge of an individual’s personality can aid in reducing mismatches, which, in turn, can lead to reduced turnover and higher job satisfaction.

Research supports that five basic dimensions underlie all other personality dimensions. The five basic dimensions are:

• Extraversion: Comfort level with relationships. Extraverts tend to be gregarious, assertive, and sociable. Introverts tend to be reserved, timid, and quiet. • Agreeableness: Individual’s propensity to defer to others. Highly agreeable people—cooperative, warm, and trusting. Low agreeableness people—cold, disagreeable, and antagonistic. • Conscientiousness: A measure of reliability. A high conscientious person is responsible, organized, dependable, and persistent. Those who score low on this dimension are easily distracted, disorganized, and unreliable. • Emotional stability: A person’s ability to withstand stress. People with positive emotional stability tend to be calm, self-confident, and secure. Those with high negative scores tend to be nervous, anxious, depressed, and insecure. • Openness to experience: The range of interests 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.

Of the five factors “conscientiousness” predicted job performance across all occupational groups. Individuals who are dependable, reliable, careful, thorough, able to plan, organized, hardworking, etc. tend to have a high job performance record.

The Big Five model translates across almost all cross-cultural studies. There are no common personality types for a given country. There is evidence that cultures differ in terms of people’s relationship to their environment. In North America, people believe that they can dominate their environment. People in Middle Eastern countries believe that life is essentially preordained. The prevalence of Type A personalities will be somewhat influenced by the culture in which a person grows up. There are more in capitalistic countries. In cultures such as Sweden and France, where materialism is less revered, we would predict a smaller proportion of Type A personalities.

We can look at certain personality characteristics that tend to be related to job success, test for those traits, and use the data to make selection more effective. A person who accepts rules, conformity, dependence, and rates high on authoritarianism is likely to feel more comfortable in, say, a structured assembly-line job, as an admittance clerk in a hospital, or as an administrator in a large public agency than as a researcher or an employee whose job requires a high degree of creativity.

Emotions

Can managers control the emotions of their colleagues and employees? No. Emotions are a natural part of an individual’s makeup. Where managers err is if they ignore the emotional elements in organizational behavior and assess individual behavior as if it were completely rational. As one consultant aptly put it, “You can’t divorce emotions from the workplace because you can’t divorce emotions from people.’’ Managers who understand the role of emotions will significantly improve their ability to explain and predict individual behavior.

Emotional labor is when an employee expresses organizationally desired emotions during interpersonal transactions. Originally developed in relation to service jobs, but now seems to apply to every job. For example, you are expected to be courteous and not hostile in interactions with coworkers.

Do emotions affect job performance? Yes. They can hinder performance, especially negative emotions. That is probably why organizations, for the most part, try to extract emotions out of the workplace. Emotions can also enhance performance. How? Two ways. First, emotions can increase arousal levels, thus acting as motivators to higher performance. Second, emotional labor recognizes that feelings can be part of a job’s required behavior. For instance, the ability to effectively manage emotions in leadership and sales positions may be critical to success in those positions.

Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to an assortment of non-cognitive skills, capabilities, and competencies that influence a person’s ability to succeed in coping with environmental demands and pressures. • Self-awareness: Being aware of what you are feeling. • Self-management: The ability to manage one’s own emotions and impulses. • Self-motivation: The ability to persist in the face of setbacks and failures. • Empathy: The ability to sense how others are feeling. • Social skills: The ability to handle the emotions of others. • Several studies suggest EI may play an important role in job performance.

What differentiates functional from dysfunctional emotions at work? While there is no precise answer to this, it has been suggested that the critical moderating variable is the complexity of the individual’s task. The more complex a task, the lower the level of arousal that can be tolerated without interfering with performance. While a certain minimal level of arousal is probably necessary for good performance, very high levels interfere with the ability to function, especially if the job requires calculative and detailed cognitive processes. Given that the trend is toward jobs becoming more complex, you can see why organizations are likely to go to considerable efforts to discourage the overt display of emotions—especially intense ones—in the workplace.