These notes consist of terminology and theories for Human Resource Management and
Industrial Psychology.
Organisational Behaviour
Locus of Control
Personality tests in the workplace
Big Five Personality traits
Personality types
Rokeach’s Instrumental and Terminal values
Emotional Intelligence
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Attribution theories
Organisational Behaviour:
a) Define organisational behaviour: How it can be analysed.
Organisational behaviour refers to how people behave or act when they are in groups. There
are three ways in which organisational behaviour is analysed namely; the individual, the
group and the organisations. Managers in the organisation have to strive to achieve goals with
the help of those around them.
b) Explaining Locus of Control in detail:
Locus of control aims to explain how people attribute the causes of their behaviour. Whether
they attribute them to themselves or environmental factors. The introversion and extroversion
approach aims to explain persons' personalities and how they react to different events in their
lives. Internal locus of control has two sub-categories, namely: internal locus of control and
external locus of control. Internal are in control of their success and they believe that by effort
and skill they can be in control of their lives. They attribute their success to internal factors.
Similar to introverts who are more focused on internal thoughts and would attribute their
success to internal factors. External locus of control attributes their success to luck and
uncontrollable forces. They attribute success to external factors, for example passing an exam
would be attributed to a good day. Similar to extroverts are more likely to attribute success to
external factors seeing that they are characterised as being sociable, talkative and outgoing.
Locus of control and introversion/extroversion approaches may differ in the sense that the
introversion/extroversion approach is more centred on personality traits and locus of control is
more centred on behaviour towards success or failure.
c) Personality tests in the workplace: How they can affect the organisation:
When making employment-related decisions, employers can try avoiding abuses and
expensive discrimination lawsuits when they are making use of personality testing. Employers
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, or organisations can cancel the use of personality testing and make use of job-related skills
testing and interviews when selecting new employees. Neither methodological problem with
personality testing, nor unethical applications automatically contradicts the underlying
concepts. Regardless of the disagreements that arose concerning personality testing,
organisations/employers need to know about personality traits and characteristics. Even
though there seem to be criticisms about personality testing they remain useful for self-
awareness and awareness of individual differences.
d) Big five personality test/traits:
Extroversion: One’s comfort level. Individuals who score high points for this dimension tend
to be talkative, open to new experiences and find it easy to socialise with people. Individuals
who score low points for this dimension are the direct opposite of extroverts. Introverts are
known to be quiet and anti-social.
Emotional stability: It refers to how individuals can handle their emotions. Individuals with
high emotional stability tend to be self-confident, worry less and do not usually have negative
emotions. Those with low emotional stability tend to be nervous, anxious, depressed and tend
to have mood swings.
Conscientiousness: Refers to individuals who are organised, careful, responsible and self-
disciplined. Those with low conscientiousness are often sloppy, disorganised, and
irresponsible.
Agreeableness: This refers to how people can maintain a relationship with others. They tend
to forgive more, trusting, understanding and gentle. Those with low agreeableness tend to be
rude, not caring and don't consider other people's feelings.
Openness: Refers to how individuals are open to new experiences. They are often
characterised as curious, broad-minded and imaginative. Those who score less on this
dimension do not like change and are unimaginative.
Conscientiousness is correlated with performance since it puts more emphasis on one’s ability
to be organised, careful, responsible and self-disciplined which are characteristics that most
organisations/employers would expect to see in their employees.
e) Personality Types: Carl Jung
Personality types were developed to distinguish a variety of personality types of individuals
based on common patterns of characteristics between people. Carl Jung developed personality
types, consisting of three dimensions. These dimensions aim to explain the characteristics that
exist among people or their personality types. Each of these dimensions has sub-categories.
How people perceive: According to Jung, people have two ways of perceiving or taking in
information namely; sensing and intuiting. Sensing refers to how people become aware of
things directly through their five senses. These people are characterised as having a huge
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