COURSE LEARNING MODULE

HBOR 1013 Human Behavior in Organization

AY 2023-2023

Lesson: Types of Traits

Topic: Explain how personality traits affect job performance

Learning Outcomes: At the end of this module, you are expected to:

1. Identify the key traits in the Big Five Personality Model

2. Explain the impact of job typology on the personality, job performance relationship

LEARNING CONTENT

Introduction:

Do you know any people who are excessively competitive and always seem to be experiencing a chronic
sense of time urgency? If you do, it's a good bet that those people have a Type A personality.

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Lesson Proper:

Type A Personality.. A person with a Type A personality is "aggressively involved in a chronic, incessant
struggle to achieve more and more in less and less time, and, if required to do 50, against the opposing efforts
of other things or other persons.

Type A's are:

always moving feel impatient with the rate at which most events take
place
walking strive to think or do two or more things at once
eating rapidly cannot cope with leisure time
are obsessed with numbers measuring their success in terms of how many or how
much of everything they acquire

Type A personality
Aggressive involvement in a chronic, incessant struggle to achieve more and more in less and less time and,
if necessary, against the opposing efforts of other things or other people.

Type B's
1.never suffer from a sense of time urgency with its accompanying impatience
2. feel no need to display or discuss either their achievements or accomplishments unless such exposure is
demanded by the situation;
3. play for fun and relaxation rather than to exhibit their superiority at any cost;

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 Differences
Type A’s operating under moderate to high levels of stress. They subject themselves to more or less
continuous time pressure, creating for themselves a life of deadlines. These characteristics result in some
rather specific behavioral outcomes. For example, Type A's are fast workers because they emphasize
quantity over quality. In managerial positions, Type A's demonstrate their competitiveness by working long
hours and, not infrequently, making poor decisions because they make them too fast. Type A's are also rarely
creative. Because of their concern with quantity and speed, they rely on past experiences when faced with
problems. They rarely vary in their responses to specific challenges in their milieu; hence, their behavior is
easier to predict than that of Type B's.
Are Type A's or Type B's more successful in organizations? Despite the Type A's hard work, the Type B's
are the ones who appear to make it to the top. Great salespersons are usually Type A's; senior executives
are usually Type B's. Why? The answer lies in the tendency of Type A's to trade off quality of effort for
quantity. Promotions in corporate and professional organizations "usually go to those who are wise rather
than to those who are merely hasty, to those who are tactful rather than to those who are hostile, and to
those who are creative rather than to those who are merely agile in competitive strife.

PERSONALITY AND NATIONAL CULTURE

Do personality frameworks, such as the Big Five model, transfer across cultures? Are dimensions such as locus
of control and the Type A personality relevant in all cultures? Let's try to answer these questions.

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's culture influences the dominant personality characteristics of its population.
We can see this by looking at locus of control and the Type A personality.

"Deep Down, People Are All Alike"

This statement is essentially false. Only in the broadest sense can we say that "people are all alike." For instance,
it's true that people all have values, attitudes, likes and dislikes, feelings, goals, and similar general
attributes. But individual differences are far more illuminating.6 People differ in intelligence, personality, abilities,
ambition, motivations, emotional display, values, priorities, expectations, and the like.

Take the task of selecting among job applicants Managers regularly use information about a candidate's
personality (in addition to experience, knowledge, skill level, and intellectual abilities) to help make their hiring
decisions. Recognizing that jobs differ in terms of demands and requirements, managers interview and test
applicants to:
(1) categorize them by specific traits,
(2) assess job tasks in terms of the type of personality best suited for effectively completing those tasks, and
(3) match applicants and job tasks to find an appropriate fit.

The prevalence of Type A personalities will be somewhat influenced by the culture in which a person grows up.
There are Type A's in every country, but there will be more in capitalistic countries, where achievement and
material success are highly valued. For instance, it is estimated that about 50 percent of the North American
population is Type A.39 This percentage shouldn't be too surprising.

ACHIEVING PERSONALITY FIT

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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 an 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 conclusions were often qualified to recognize
that the requirements of the job moderated the relationship between possession of the personality characteristic
and job performance. This concern with matching the job requirements with personality characteristics is best
articulated in John Holland's personality-job fit theory." The theory is based on the notion of fit between an
individual's personality characteristics and his or her occupational environment. Holland presents six personality
types and proposes that satisfaction and the propensity to leave a job depend on the degree to which individuals
successfully match their personalities to an occupational environment.

What does all this mean? The theory argues that satisfaction is highest and turnover lowest when personality
and occupation are in agreement. Social individuals should be in social jobs, conventional people in conventional
jobs, and So forth. A realistic person in a realistic job is in a more congruent situation than is a realistic person
in an investigative job.

Holland's Typology of Personality and Congruent Occupations

Type Personality Characteristics Congruent Occupation

Realistic Prefers physical activities
that require skill, strength, and
coordination
Investigative: Prefers activities
that involve thinking, organizing
and understanding
Social Prefers activities that
involve helping and developing
others
Conventional Prefers rule
regulated, orderly, and
unambiguous activities
Enterprising Prefers verbal
activities in which there are
opportunities to influence others
and attain power
Artistic Prefers ambiguous and
unsystematic activities that allow
creative expression
Shy, genuine, persistent, stable,
conforming practical
Analytical, original, curious,
independent
Sociable, friendly, cooperative,
understanding
Conforming, efficient practical.
unimaginative, inflexible
Self-confident, ambitious,
energetic, domineering
Imaginative disorderly, idealistic,
emotional, impractical
Mechanic, drill press operator,
assembly-line worker, farmer
Biologist, economist,
mathematician, news reporter
Social worker, teacher, counselor,
clinical psychologist
Accountant, corporate manager,
bank teller, file clerk
Lawyer, real estate
agent, public relations specialist,
small business manager
Painter, musician, writer, interior
decorator

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 the overall organization's culture than with the
characteristics of any specific job.

The person-organization fit essentially argues that people leave jobs that are not compatible with their
personalities. Using the Big Five terminology, for instance, we could expect that people high on extraversion fit
better with aggressive and team-oriented cultures; people high on agreeableness will match up better with a
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supportive organizational climate than one that focuses on aggressiveness; and that people high on openness
to experience fit better into organizations that emphasize innovation rather than standardization." Following these
guidelines at the time of hiring should lead to selecting new employees who fit better with the organization's
culture, which, in turn, should result in higher employee satisfaction and reduced turnover.

*** END of LESSON ***

REFERENCES

Textbooks

Mcshane, S. & Glinow, M. (2018). Organizational behavior: emerging knowledge. global reality, McGraw-Hill Education

Books:

Colquitt, J., et. al. (2019). Organizational Behavior -Improving Performance and Commitment in the Workplace. Mc Graw
Hill Education

King, D. and Lawley, S. (2019). Organizational Behavior. Oxford

Knights, D., Willmott, H. (2022). Introducing organizational behaviour and management. 4th ed. Annabel Ainscow

Lussier, R. (2019). Human Relations in Organizations: Applications and Skills Building. MCGraw Hill.

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This document is a property of University of Saint Louis Tuguegarao. It must not be reproduced or transmitted in any form,
in whole or in part, without expressed written permission.