Chapter 3
The Environment
Individual differences
Personal attributes that vary from one person to another
Fit is an important concept in organizations
Type of Fit:
Person-job fit
The fit between a person’s abilities and the demands of the job, and the fit between a
person’s desires and motivations and the attributes and rewards of a job
Person-group fit (or person-team fit)
The extent to which an individual fits with the workgroup’s and supervisor’s work
styles, skills, and goals
Person-organization fit
The fit between an individual’s values, beliefs, and personality and the values, norms,
and culture of the organization
Person-vocation fit
The fit between a person’s interests, abilities, values, and personality and a profession
Realistic job previews (RJPs)
Involve the presentation of both positive and potentially negative information to job
candidates
Personality
The relatively stable set of psychological attributes that distinguish one person from
another
“Big Five” personality traits
A set of five fundamental traits that are especially relevant to organizations
1. Agreeableness: The ability to get along with others
2. Conscientiousness: Refers to an individual being dependable and organized
3. Neuroticism: Characterized by a person’s tendency to experience unpleasant
emotions such as anger, anxiety, depression, and feelings of vulnerability
4. Extraversion: The quality of being comfortable with relationships
Introversion: The tendency to be less comfortable in relationships and social situations
5. Openness: The capacity to entertain new ideas and to change as a result of new
information
Limitation of Big Five
1. Using more specific personality traits to predict outcomes such as turnover or
performance are more useful
2. Big Five framework is primarily based on research conducted in the United
States.
The Myers-Briggs framework
A personality framework based upon Carl Jung’s work on psychological types and
measured by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
Psychologist Carl Jung was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud and a leading
exponent of Gestalt personality theory.
The MBTI was first developed by Isabel Briggs Myers (1897–1979) and her
mother, Katharine Cook Briggs, to help people understand themselves and each
other so that they could find work that matches their personality
The MBTI uses four scales with opposite poles to assess four sets of
preferences. The four scales are:
1. Extroversion (E)/Introversion (I): Extroverts are energized by things and people.
Introverts find energy in ideas, concepts, and abstractions.
2. Sensing (S)/Intuition (N): Sensing people are detail oriented. Intuitive people
seek out patterns and relationships among the facts that they have learned.
3. Thinking (T)/Feeling (F): Thinkers value fairness and decide things impersonally
based on objective criteria and logic. Feelers value harmony and focus on human
values and needs as they make decisions or judgments.
4. Judging (J)/Perceiving (P): Judging people are decisive and tend to plan.
Perceptive people are adaptable, spontaneous, and curious.
OTHER IMPORTANT PERSONALITY TRAITS
Locus of control
The extent to which one believes one’s circumstances are a function of either one’s
own actions or of external factors beyond one’s control
Authoritarianism
The belief that power and status differences are appropriate within hierarchical social
systems such as organizations
Machiavellianism
A trait causing a person to behave in ways to gain power and control the behavior of
others
Named after Niccolo Machiavelli, a sixteenth-century author
Tolerance for risk (also called risk propensity)
The degree to which a person is comfortable with risk and is willing to take chances
and make risky decisions
Tolerance for ambiguity
Reflects the tendency to view ambiguous situations as either threatening or desirable
Type A personality
Impatient, competitive, ambitious, and uptight
Type B personality
More relaxed and easygoing and less overtly competitive than Type A
Workplace bullying
Repeated mistreatment of another employee through verbal abuse; conduct that is
threatening, humiliating, or intimidating; or sabotage that interferes with the other
person’s work
General mental ability
The capacity to rapidly and fluidly acquire, process, and apply information
Information processing capacity
Involves the way individuals process and organize information
Multiple intelligences
Gardner’s theory Suggests that there are several distinct forms of intelligence that
everyone possesses in varying degrees:
1. Linguistic: words and language
2. Logical–mathematical: logic and numbers
3. Musical: music, rhythm, and sound
4. Bodily–kinesthetic: body movement and control
5. Spatial–visual: images and space
6. Interpersonal: other people’s feelings
7. Intrapersonal: self-awareness
Emotional intelligence (EI)
An interpersonal capability that includes the ability to perceive and express emotions,
to understand and use them, and to manage emotions in oneself and other people
The five dimensions comprising emotional intelligence are:
1. Self-awareness: being aware of what you are feeling
2. Self-motivation: persisting in the face of obstacles, setbacks, and failures
3. Self-management: managing your own emotions and impulses
4. Empathy: sensing how others are feeling
5. Social skills: effectively handling the emotions of others
Learning style
Refers to individual differences and preferences in how we process information while
problem solving, learning, or engaging in similar activities
Several of the most popular approaches to learning styles:
1. Sensory modality
A system that interacts with the environment through one of the basic senses
• Visual: learning by seeing
• Auditory: learning by hearing
• Tactile: learning by touching
• Kinesthetic: learning by doing
2. Learning style inventory
Kolb suggests that there are four basic learning styles:
1. Convergers: depend primarily on active experimentation and abstract
conceptualization to learn. People with this style are superior in technical tasks
and problems and inferior in interpersonal learning settings
2. Divergers: depend primarily on concrete experience and reflective
observation. . People with this style tend to organize concrete situations from
different perspectives and structure their relationships into a meaningful whole.
3. Assimilators: depend on abstract conceptualization and reflective
observation. . These individuals tend to be more concerned about abstract
concepts and ideas than about people.
4. Accommodators: rely mainly on active experimentation and concrete
experiences and focus on risk taking, opportunity seeking, and action.
Accommodators tend to deal with people easily and specialize in action oriented
jobs, such as marketing and sales
3. Learning style orientations
By Annette Towler and Robert Dipboye
They identified five key factors:
1. Discovery learning: an inclination for exploration during learning.
2. Experiential learning: a desire for hands-on approaches to instruction.
3. Observational learning: a preference for external stimuli such as demonstrations
and diagrams to help facilitate learning.
4. Structured learning: a preference for processing strategies such as taking notes,
writing down task steps, and so forth.
5. Group learning: a preference to work with others while learning.
