Assignment of Organizational Psychology

Topic:
Personality Difference and Nature of Work

Submitted to:
Miss Sana Chatha

Submitted By:
M.Suleman Imtiaz(1325)
Noor-ul-Ain

(1359)

Submission Date:
September 29, 2015

Class:
BBA-E9
9th semester

Hajvery University

Content

Personality
personality Differences
Personality Traits
Personality determinants
How Is Personality Measured?
What is Job Satisfaction?
Relationship of rewards and job satisfaction
Performance and Job satisfaction
Job satisfaction features.
What causes job satisfaction.
Personality difference in job nature working

environment
Relationship between personality and work behaviors.
Influence of Big five factor personality model in job
satisfaction

Our personality shapes our behavior, so if we want to

better understand the behavior of someone in an
organization; it helps if we know something about his or
her personality. In the first half of this chapter, we review
the research on personality and its relationship to
behavior. In the latter half, we look at how values shape
many of our work-related behaviors.

Personality
Why are some people quiet and passive, whereas others
are loud and aggressive? Are certain personality types
better adapted for certain job types? Before we can
answer these questions, we must address a more basic
one: What is personality?

What is personality?
Personality can be thought of as 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.
Personality is the sum total of ways in which an individual
reacts to and interacts with others. it can be good or bad.

Personality Traits
The early research on the structure of personality
revolved around attempts to identify and label enduring
characteristics that describe an individuals behavior.
Popular characteristics include
aggressive,

submissive,
lazy,
ambitious,
loyal,
timid
shy

Personality Determinants
1. Personality can be described as: the collective qualities,
characteristics, disposition and values of a person
which distinguish him or her from others, and which will
affect the manners he/she reacts toward or interacts
with other people and his /her environment.
2. A persons personality should be seen as on-going
development process. Every person has a different
personality and set of traits.
3. Biological factors, cultural factors, social factors,
situational factors.
4. Brain is one of the most important factors of
personality determinant. It is generally believed that the
father and the child adopt almost the same type of brain
stimulation and the later differences are the result of the
environment in which the child has been grown up.
Electrical Stimulation of the Brain (ESB) and Split Brain
Psychology (SBP) and the outcomes of genetic
transmissions and are the tools that are used by the
management of any organization to mould and amend
the employees behavior to a more positive and proper
one.

5. Physical Factors one of the most important factors in

determining personality is the Physical Characteristics of
an individual. It is believed that this factor plays a vital
role in determining ones behavior in any organization.
Physical features may involve the height of a person
(short or tall), his color (white or black), his health status
(fat or skinny) and his beauty (handsome or ugly). These
factors are involved when interacting with any other
person and thus contribute in the personality
development in many ways.
6. Heredity Factors Last, but not the least, the heredity
factors play a very important role as the major
determinants and factors of personality. Heredity factors
are the ones that are determined at the time of
conception. These factors not only affect the physical
features of a person, but the intelligence level,
attentiveness, gender, temperament, various inherited
diseases and energy level, all get affected by them. The
example of how heredity factors determine such a huge
and significant part of an individuals personality can
easily be observed in children. Many children behave
exactly how their parents do. Similarly, twin siblings also
have a lot of things in common.
7. Social factors also play a vital role in determining ones
personality. The things that revolve and evolve around us
on a regular basis determine our personality. The society
that we live in, the cultural environment that we face
daily, the community we get interacted to, all are
included in this factor. Relationships, co-ordination, co-

operation, interaction, environment in the family,

organizations, workplaces, communities, societies all
contribute in way or another as personality determinants.
8. The culture in which one life in that may involve
traditional practices, norms, customs, procedures, rules
and regulations, precedents and values, all are important
determinants of personality. Moreover, the creed, religion
and believes are also very important factors of
personality determinants.
9. Although these factors do not literally create and shape
up an individuals personality, situational factors do alter
a persons behavior and response from time to time. The
situational factors can be commonly observed when a
person behaves contrastingly and exhibits different traits
and characteristics. For example, a persons behavior will
be totally different when he is in his office, in front of his
boss, when compared to his hangout with old friends in a
bar. In this way, situational factors impact a personality in
a significant way. They often bring out the traits of a
person that are not commonly seen.

How Is Personality Measured?

Physical traits such as height and weight can be
measured readily by means of simple tools. Various
aspects of personality, however, cannot be assessed
quite so simply. There are no rulers that we can put to the
task. How, then, can we quantify differences between
individuals with respect to their various personality
characteristics? Several methods exist for accomplishing

this task. In this section, well describe two of the most

important and will then consider some of the essential
requirements that all procedures for measuring individual
differences must meet
Objective tests
Questionnaires and inventories designed to measure
various aspects of personality.
Reliability
The extent to which a test yields consistent scores on
various occasions and the extent to which all of its items
measure the same underlying construct.
Validity
The extent to which a test actually measures what it
claims to measure.

Job Satisfaction
Job
satisfaction or
employee satisfaction has
been
defined in many different ways. Some believe it is simply
how content an individual is with his or her job, in other
words, whether or not they like the job or individual
aspects or facets of jobs, such as nature of work or
supervision. There are many aspects to job satisfaction,
depending on what each individual person feels is
important. In many ways, the word 'reward' alone can
mean different things to different people, and in this
lesson, we are going to look at job satisfaction and its
place in today's business environment. Our goal is to
understand job satisfaction, or how content someone is

with their job and the sense of accomplishment they get

from doing it.

Rewards and Job Satisfaction

Rewards in job means something in return it is in
many forms like promotion, incentive, etc. but
there is also one other phase of job satisfaction and
that is Rewards can take a monetary form (money)
or be a more intangible reward, like the feeling a
person might get when doing a job that helps
others (a nurse, for example). We can even think of
a reward as the prestige you get for actually doing
a job (as with a judge or other politicians).
One aspect of job satisfaction that is not really
reward-related is job security. Let's face it - some
people obtain job satisfaction from knowing the
company they are in is stable and not going
anywhere. There are individuals who feel this is the
most important aspect of a job, and having a stable
company makes them feel secure, which helps
promote job satisfaction.

Performance and job satisfaction

The relationship between how satisfied a person is with
their job and their actual job performance is open to
discussion and debate. You see, it's hard to correlate
those two aspects primarily because when people are
asked if they get job satisfaction from working at ABC
Company, a certain percentage will say yes just because
they think if they say no, there could be a negative

consequence. After all, if you tell your boss you are not
satisfied with your job, what if his reply is 'Then I guess
you better leave'? Thus, while we understand there is a
correlation between satisfaction and performance, it's
hard to definitively nail it down without some sort of
survey error being present.
One thing is certain: There are two basic views of
satisfaction and performance, and they are inverted to
one another. One believes that satisfaction leads to
performance, while the other believes performance leads
to satisfaction. In effect, we are saying if someone is
happy with their job they will perform better, but in order
to be satisfied, they have to perform in their job to get
that satisfaction. It is somewhat of a revolving door, and
again, it is hard to distinguish between whether
satisfaction drives performance or if performance drives
satisfaction.
Regardless of your viewpoint, it does not take a lot of
thought to realize that if someone has a high level of job
satisfaction, they will probably have a high level of
performance. On the other hand, if someone is not
satisfied with their job, they probably will not have the
same high level of performance.

Job satisfaction features.

Work it self
Salary
Extra benefits
Advancement opportunities

 Supervision
Co workers
Environment/ safety

What causes job satisfaction?

There is an interesting relationship between salary and
job satisfaction There is a strong relationship when the
employees are below the poverty line but this relationship
disappears when they achieve a comfortable life style
Rewards
Employees are more satisfied when they feel they are
rewarded fairly for the work they do, notes the National
Business Research Institute. An institute survey of more
than 15,000 workers found that employees who feel they
are rewarded fairly experience less job-related stress.
Rewards dont mean compensation alone, however.
Health insurance, dental insurance, vacation time and
retirement plans also fall into this category.
Opportunities
Workers want to be able to use their skills and abilities in
a way that contributes to the organization, says the
Society for Human Resource Management. In addition to
promotional opportunities, workers also want to be
challenged on the job. The National Business Research
Institute recommends employers offer jobs with
increasing levels of leadership and responsibility and give
promising employees a role in interesting projects.
Supervision
Job satisfaction increases when employees have a good
relationship with their immediate supervisors. Workers
want input on the decisions that affect them and

adequate freedom to do their jobs, advises the NBRI.

Increased autonomy can give employees a greater sense
of responsibility for the outcomes of their work and, in
turn, may increase their satisfaction, the SHRM research
finds. Communication between workers and an
organizations leadership also plays a strong role in job
satisfaction. Managers should share information with
employees regularly and open the door for two-way
communication. Employees should also have avenues to
share feedback and suggestions with management.
Job Security
Employees enjoy their work more when they arent
worried about losing their jobs. In the SHRM survey,
employees of mid-sized and large businesses placed
more weight on job security as a job-satisfaction factor
than workers at small companies did. Male employees
considered job security a more important factor in
satisfaction than female staff members did.

Relationship between personality and work

behaviors
Employees tend to be more satisfied and committed in
jobs that involve certain characteristics. The ability to use
a variety of skills, having autonomy at work, receiving
feedback on the job, and performing a significant task are
some job characteristics that are related to satisfaction
and commitment. However, the presence of these factors
is not important for everyone. Some people have a high
need for growth. These employees tend to be more
satisfied when their jobs help them build new skills and
improve

A person's personality may not necessarily have a very

high impact on a person's job or productivity per se,
depending on the type of work being done. As discussed
by Sean P. Neubert, the notion that salespeople who
exhibit high levels of extraversion will have better overall
job performance is pretty evident, for being a salesperson
requires a lot of social interaction, and an introverted
salesperson would obviously be less effective than an
extravert. Given that point, another point brought up is
about conscientiousness in addition to extraversion and
its positive correlation with job performance in terms of
the social atmosphere present in most workplaces: a
conscientious person is obviously more likely to be a
more productive worker and an extraverted person will
experience an optimal level of arousal in a social
workplace. Personality influence would perhaps become
less palpable if an individual's place of work is not a
highly social arena or the job is non-traditional.
If one's job does not require constant or high levels of
social interaction, then one's cognitive ability can become
a much greater factor. Depending on the type of job one
holds, one's personality may have very little impact on
the quality of work being done or other job performance
indicators. As mentioned by Neubert, a job such as a
writer may not necessarily require high levels of
extraversion. Other types of jobs that do not require
direct social interaction are probably similar in terms of
cognitive abilities or other factors affecting overall job
performance.

Openness to experience has not been shown to correlate

significantly with job performance. This may seem
counterintuitive, because openness to experience is
sometimes also referred to intellect, and cognitive ability
and intellect are presumably related. One's openness to
experience should be indicative of creativity and
originality; consequently, there may be a direct but
unobvious connection to job performance in terms of
creating and trying new things that may improve
personal productivity or otherwise maybe even affect
general productivity on a greater scale--for example, a
new way of doing things may improve operation of an
entire company. Openness would also then tie into
working with other people--for example, a person who is
more open to experience would be willing to try out new
and different ideas presented by coworkers. Openness
may not relate to job performance due to limitations in
the methodology of past research, lack of a high enough
correlation to reach statistical significance, or even
perhaps because there really is no direct relation between
openness to experience and overall job performance.
People's personalities obviously have an impact on many,
many things that they do, if not everything. How
profound the effect of personality is on job performance
depends of course on the unique facets of an individual's
personality. Does personality have a great impact on
overall productivity in a social workplace? Yes, it does.
Cognitive ability, however, has been shown to be more
positively correlated to actual task performance. From

this fact, one can argue that personality comes into play
again, because if one is unwilling to perform the task and
lacks conscientiousness, then the job will not get done,
regardless of potential ability. Social aspects of many
traditional work environments may overshadow some
other unseen factors that affect overall workplace
productivity. More research needs to be conducted on
other types of work environment

Influence of Big five factor personality model

in job satisfaction
These traits help in predicting the performance at work as
how to select the perfect candidate according to job
requirements
Extraversion
This dimension captures ones comfort level with
relationships. Extroverts tend to be gregarious, assertive,
and sociable. Introverts tend to be reserved, timid, and
quiet
Agreeableness
This dimension refers to an individuals propensity to
defer to others. Highly agreeable people are cooperative,
warm, and trusting. People who score low on
agreeableness are cold, disagreeable, and antagonistic.
Conscientiousness

This dimension is a measure of reliability. A highly

conscientious person is responsible, organized,
dependable, and persistent. Those who score low on this
dimension are easily distracted, disorganized, and
unreliable
Emotional stability
This dimension taps a persons 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.