Summary Chapter 8 Organizational Behaviour King and Lawley

Organizational Behaviour Summary Chapter 8
Personality and Individual Differences
 Recruitment=the process of attracting a pool of candidates for a particular job
vacancy
 Selection=the process of selecting most appropriate candidate from a pool of
applicants for a particular vacancy
 Confirmation bias=people only tend to take note of information which confirms
their already held perceptions
 Informal measures= e.g. phone calls to previous employers or checks for social
networking sites
o Checking social media raises legal issues-employers have access to information
that cannot be used legally for selection decisions (information about sexual
orientation, religion, etc)
3 approaches to study personality
 Nomothetic approach
 Ideographic approach
 Social radical approach
Nomothetic approach
 =trait theories; traits are the main building blocks of a personality
o Two of the most popular trait theory testing instruments used in the
workplace:
 16 personality factor
 Big five personality scale
 Personality as a set of measurable traits
 Sorts people into particular personality types or scales
 Two approaches:
o Classify people into broad personality types
o Plotting people on a number of scales between two opposite ends of a
particular trait
 Questionnaires are usually trademarked commercial products for which a
company wishing to recruit will pay for the right to use
 Predictive validity is low
o Candidates may fake answers
 Labelling a personality can not only define how the person identifies themselves,
but how they actually act a test starts to affect and change a personality
Ideographic approach
 Personality as something much more dynamic which develops as a result of our
experiences and interactions rich, complex personalities, rather than as fitting
into a certain personality type
 With methods such as the MBTI, there are only 16 possible combinations of
personality type: you share a personality type with one sixteenth of the world’s
population
 Personalities are processual=in a continual process of being changed and
influenced; the develop from childhood onwards in an individual way, being
influenced by environmental factors
o Particular areas of society will have an influence on our personality, for
example:
 Family and upbringing
 School and University
 Organization and workplace
 Social categories (e.g. gender, religion, social class)
 Has its roots in psychoanalytic tradition of Sigmund Freud
 Understanding of a personality comes from lengthy therapy sessionsno solution
for efficiency in recruiting process