Lecture notes
Organisational psychology: notes on personality at work
- Module
- Organisational Psychology
- Institution
- University College London (UCL)
Lecture notes of 13 pages for the course Organisational Psychology at UCL ((Part 1 of 2))
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L5: Personality Intro Slides1. Historical development of personality
- Although there is no generally agreed upon definition of personality, one of
the most influential could be considered Allport’s definition. Gordon W.
Allport defined personality as the dynamic organisation within the individual
of those psychophysical systems that determine his characteristic behaviour
and thought.
- Stability
- Fundamental Lexical Hypothesis
- Taxonomy: It has now been recognized that part of the reason for the
decline of personality variables in psychology, particularly organizational
psychology, was because no well-accepted taxonomy existed for classifying
personality traits (Barrick & Mount, 1991). Taxonomies are critically
important to the advancement of science, as they facilitate the organization
and accumulation of knowledge, hypothesis generation, efficient
communication among scientists, and retrieval of information
- Thus, the recent extensive interest can be attributed to recent personality
taxonomies, which provided the organising principles that have enabled
researchers to establish relationships between personality and job-related
criteria, and which highlighted the importance of these relationships.
- In general, the taxonomies used are based upon measures of normal & adult
personality. They provide a broad description of personality that could be
used in various settings, as their initial purpose was the accurate description
of individual differences in personality.
- Many psychologists believe that the FFM is an adequate taxonomy to employ
(Costa & McCrae, Goldberg), and it has been shown to be useful as an
organising taxonomy for organizational psychology. However, it has been
argued that the taxonomy used in this domain makes a difference to the
outcome of the analysis. Moreover, some critique the use of the FFM (e.g.:
Block, 1995)
- Research clearly suggests that personality variables correlate differently with
differ- ent job performance constructs (Day & Silverman, 1989; Hough,
, 1996). Current research on the relation between personality and job
performance has involved the integration of personality measures with the
FFM. (more in that part)
-
- Furnham (2005) suggests that this interest regarding the connection
between personality factors and work-related behaviour could be considered
to be cyclical, as we can observe a renewal in the 1920, 1950 or 1980, but
these periods are almost routinely followed by periods of scepticism.
- However, there is recently renewed academic interest in personality and job
performance, as increading good evidence suggests that personality traits
play a powerful role in determining work-related behaviour. It is worth
mentioning that quantity of research has grown in this area and we are now
in a much better position to evaluate the relationships between personality,
ability and occupational organizational behaviour.
- E.g.: Hurtz & Donovan, 2000:
- Various meta-analyses supporting the idea of using personality measures in
employee selection. E.g.: Barrick et al, 2002 / Salgado, 1997
- Hough et al, 1990 suggested that personality tests account for between 15
and 30 % of the variance in explaining work behaviour
- An examination of the highly diverse, dispersed and divergent literature
concerning personality at work has highlighted six rather different
approaches to the topic (Furnham, 1992).
- (Eg1) Classic personality theory: Classic personality theory starts with a
theory of personality – usually of a particular trait, such as extraversion,
Machiavellism or self-monitoring (see later sections) – and relates empirically
assessed measures (as the independent variable) to various work- related
behaviours. The personality variable chosen may vary on several dimensions.
- Usually multiple traits are proffered in work psychology, as they provide the
researcher with a richer source of description.
- Both cognitive and biological based traits are equally popular, although some
believe cognitive traits to be more important as they can be more amenable
to changing and coaching than biologically based traits. (cognitive traits such
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