Chapter 8: Personality, Cultural Values, & Ability
Copyright © 2010 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. McGraw-Hill/Irwin
Personality, Cultural Values, and Ability
• Personality refers to the structures and propensities inside a person that explain his or her characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior.» Traits are defined as recurring regularities or trends in people’s
responses to their environment.• Cultural values reflect the shared beliefs about desirable
end states or modes of conduct in a given culture.• Ability refers to the relatively stable capabilities people
have to perform a particular range of different but related activities.
• Taken together, these sorts of “individual differences” can tell us a lot about people, with personality capturing what people are like, ability capturing what people can do, and cultural values capturing where people are from (in a cultural sense).
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The Big Five Personality Traits
• Conscientiousness - dependable, organized, reliable, ambitious, hardworking, and persevering.» Conscientiousness has the biggest influence on job
performance.» Conscientious employees prioritize accomplishment
striving, which reflects a strong desire to accomplish task-related goals as a means of expressing personality.
• Agreeableness - warm, kind, cooperative, sympathetic, helpful, and courteous.» Prioritize communion striving, which reflects a strong
desire to obtain acceptance in personal relationships as a means of expressing personality.
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The Big Five Personality Traits, Cont’d
• Extraversion - talkative, sociable, passionate, assertive, bold, and dominant.» Prioritize status striving, which reflects a strong
desire to obtain power and influence within a social structure as a means of expressing personality.
» Tend to be high in what’s called positive affectivity — a dispositional tendency to experience pleasant, engaging moods such as enthusiasm, excitement, and elation.
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The Big Five Personality Traits, Cont’d
• Neuroticism - nervous, moody, emotional, insecure, and jealous.» Synonymous with negative affectivity —a dispositional
tendency to experience unpleasant moods such as hostility, nervousness, and annoyance.
» Neuroticism is also strongly related to locus of control, which reflects whether people attribute the causes of events to themselves or to the external environment.
– Tend to hold an external locus of control, meaning that they often believe that the events that occur around them are driven by luck, chance, or fate.
– Less neurotic people tend to hold an internal locus of control, meaning that they believe that their own behavior dictates events.
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The Big Five Personality Traits, Cont’d
• Openness to experience - curious, imaginative, creative, complex, refined, and sophisticated.» Also called “Inquisitiveness” or
“Intellectualness” or even “Culture.”» Openness to experience is also more likely to
be valuable in jobs that require high levels of creativity, defined as the capacity to generate novel and useful ideas and solutions.
» Highly open individuals are more likely to migrate into artistic and scientific fields.
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Cultural Values
• Differences in cultural values can create differences in reactions to change, conflict management styles, negotiation approaches, and reward preferences.
• Employees working in different countries tended to prioritize different values, and those values clustered into several distinct dimensions.
• Ethnocentrism is defined as a propensity to view one’s own cultural values as “right” and those of other cultures as “wrong.”
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Hofstede’s Dimensions of Cultural Values
Table 8-2
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Hofstede’s Dimensions of Cultural Values, Cont’d
Table 8-2
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Cognitive Ability
• Cognitive abilities are capabilities related to the acquisition and application of knowledge in problem solving.» Verbal ability refers to various capabilities associated
with understanding and expressing oral and written communication.
– Oral comprehension is the ability to understand spoken words and sentences.
– Written comprehension is the ability to understand written words and sentences.
– Oral expression refers to the ability to communicate ideas by speaking
– Written expression refers to the ability to communicate ideas in writing.
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Cognitive Ability, Cont’d
• Quantitative ability refers to two types of mathematical capabilities. » Number facility is the capability to do simple
math operations (adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing).
» Mathematical reasoning refers to the ability to choose and apply formulas to solve problems that involve numbers.
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Cognitive Ability, Cont’d
• Reasoning ability is actually a diverse set of abilities associated with sensing and solving problems using insight, rules, and logic.» Problem sensitivity is the ability to sense that
there’s a problem or likely will be one.» Deductive reasoning refers to the use of general
rules to solve problems.» Inductive reasoning refers to the ability to consider
several specific pieces of information and then reach a more general conclusion regarding how those pieces are related.
» Originality refers to the ability to develop clever and novel ways to solve problems.
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Cognitive Ability, Cont’d
• Spatial ability» Spatial orientation refers to having a good understanding
of where one is relative to other things in the environment.» Visualization is the ability to imagine how separate things
will look if they were put together in a particular way.• Perceptual abilities generally refer to being able to
perceive, understand, and recall patterns of information. » Speed and flexibility of closure refers to being able to
pick out a pattern of information quickly in the presence of distracting information, even without all the information present.
» Perceptual speed refers to being able to examine and compare numbers, letters, and objects quickly.
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Cognitive Ability, Cont’d
• People who are high on verbal abilities also tend to be high on reasoning, quantitative, spatial, and perceptual abilities.
• The most popular explanation for the similarity in the levels of different cognitive abilities within people is that there is a general mental ability —sometimes called g or the g factor —that underlies or causes all of the more specific cognitive abilities discussed so far.
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Emotional Ability
• Emotional intelligence is a human ability that affects social functioning.» Self-awareness is the appraisal and expression of
emotions in oneself.» Other awareness is the appraisal and recognition of
emotion in others.» Emotion regulation refers to being able to recover
quickly from emotional experiences.» Use of emotions reflects the degree to which people
can harness emotions and employ them to improve their chances of being successful in whatever they are seeking to do.
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How Important Are Personality, Cultural Values, and Ability
• Two individual characteristics stand apart from the rest when it comes to relationships with performance and commitment: general cognitive ability and conscientiousness.
• Cognitive ability is a strong predictor of job performance — in particular, the task performance aspect.
• People who have higher general cognitive ability tend to be better at learning and decision making.
• Cognitive ability tends to be more strongly correlated with task performance than citizenship behavior or counterproductive behavior.
• Research has not supported a significant linkage between cognitive ability and organizational commitment.
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How Important Are Personality, Cultural Values, and Ability, Cont’d
• Conscientiousness has a moderate relationship with task performance, partly because conscientious employees have higher levels of motivation than other employees.
• Conscientiousness is a key driver of what’s referred to as typical performance, reflecting performance in the routine conditions that surround daily job tasks.
• General cognitive ability, in contrast, is the stronger driver of maximum performance, reflecting performance in brief, special circumstances that demand a person’s best effort.
• Conscientious employees are less likely to engage in counterproductive behaviors. » Tend to have higher levels of job satisfaction, making it less likely that
they’ll feel a need to retaliate against their organization. » Even if they do perceive some slight or injustice, their dependable and
reliable nature should prevent them from violating organizational norms by engaging in negative actions.
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