Personality: its basic natureHow wh

Personality: its basic nature
How whould you describe your own personality in a single sentence? Admittedly, that’s very difficult task, because what makes each of us unique is complex and hard to put into words. But personality involves more than just uniqueness. Since understanding the nature of personality is crucial to appreciating its potential role in organizational behavior, we begin by taking a closer look at this important concept.
Personality
As we noted earlier, we are all, in some ways, unique – that is, we all prossess a district pattern of traits and characteristics not fully duplicated in any other person. Further, this pattern of traits tends to be stable over time. Thus, if you know someone who is optimistic, confident, and friendly today, then chances are good that he or she also showed these same traits in the past and will continue to do so in the future. Together, these two features form the basis for a useul woking definition of personality – the unique and relatively stable pattern of behavior, thoughts, and emotions shown by individuls. As we will describe in this chapter, personality plays an important role in organizational behavior.
Personality and situations: the interactionist approach
Earlier, we indicated that personality often combines with situational factors to influence behavior. Although people prossess stable traits and characteristics that predispose them to behave in certain ways, these qualities by themselves do not completely determine how someone will behave in any given setting. Situations also introduce forces that affect how one likely to behave. Together, both personal factors and situational factors combine to influence behavior. In other words, the way someone behaves is the result of both an individual’s characteristicts (e.g., his or her knowledge, abilities, skills, and personality) and the nature of the situation in which that person operates (e.g., the nature of the job and industry, the country in which the work is being performance, ect.) this approach, known as the interactionist perspective, is very popular in the field of OB today.
Let’s consider an example. Someone with a quick temper may be predisposed o act aggressively, but he or she may refrain from expressing anger (e.g., by screaming at a coworker) because of the negative consequences of doing so in that setting (e.g., losing a job, getting into legal trouble). In this case, the situation imposes demands to hold aggression in check. Its also possible, of course, that someone’s aggressive tendencies are so strong that they override the demands of the situation, resulting in tragic consequences.
We presents these in generic form in figure 4.2., but let’s now consider some specific scenarios. First, as depicted in situation 1, suppose you are a very quite person, someone who is inclined to keep quiet most of the time. This would discourage you from saying anything, but you would be even more strongly disinclined from saying anything if you perceive the organization as discouraging people from speaking their minds (e.g., by publishing those who speak up at meetings). Now, consider situation 2, in which things are opposite. Here, suppose you are a very expressive person, someone who is inclined to speak up abuth things. This would facilitate voicing your opinions, but you would be especially likely to do so when organizational norms and culture also send strong signals that this is encouraged. As you might suspect, it’s easy for people when they encounter situation 1 or 2 because all forces lead them in the same direction. Both who they are as individuals and the demands of the situation they face lead them in the same directions