Effects of Personality on Organizational Behavior
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One of the key resources of an organisation is its employees, who play a vital role in achieving sustainable competitive advantage, for the organisation, through performance (Acaray and Yildirim, 2017). Performance is affected by various elements, one of them being the personality traits of individual employees. Personality of an individual employee can determine his strengths and weaknesses, his capabilities as an individual and as a team member (Singh and Kumar, 2017). Therefore, it becomes an important topic in organizational behavior theory to study the personalities of the employees and their effects on organizational behavior. The purpose of this essay is to discuss the effects of personality on organizational behavior because personality has a great influence on the environment in which employees are living and in which they decide to stay (Awadh and Wan Ismail, 2012). This essay will provide qualitative analysis on the topic and is guided by the question: what are the effects of personality on organizational behavior? The answer to this question will also help in understanding as to why it is important to study personality in relation to organizational behavior. Both questions have common answers and aim to provide basis of further research on the topic. Engaging with the organizational behavior theory in relation to personality will help identify the Big Five personality dimensions and I will also identify two areas for self-improvement, on the basis of Big Five Personality test results, that may enhance my academic performance.
It is important for organizations to designate various jobs to the right employee. For this purpose, it is necessary to have knowledge about the personality traits of the employees. This will help in differentiating one employee from another and providing guidance for choosing the right employees for the specific jobs, on the basis of their traits (Awadh and Wan Ismail, 2012). If a manger’s personality has the appropriate traits, they will assist in achieving the organizational goals in the form of profits and high level of performance by completing all levels of tasks under him, through appropriate planning, execution, time management, maintenance and relationships with customers and other team members. “Personality of a person helps him to react, perceive, think about the stimuli and make person’s attitude or behavior towards the environment” (Gupta and Gupta, 2020).
One of the widely used model of personality structure is the Big Five, which is a set of five traits: Extraversion (talkative, assertive, and energetic), Agreeableness (good-natured, trustful and cooperative), Conscientiousness (orderly, responsible and dependable), Neuroticism and Openness to Experience (calm, not easily upset and not neurotic) (Soto, 2018). The Big Five Test for an employee helps in studying specified dimensions of personality characteristics instead of investigating several other traits individually. They show the correlation of these five traits of an employee’s personality with his performance. I took a Big Five personality test in a workshop, where the questionnaire included 15 pair of adjectives with a scale of 1 to 5 each. After calculating adding the item scores, my final score lied in the range of 10 – 15 which is a high score. A high score in openness to experience showed that a student is imaginative with a range of various interests, a high score in conscientiousness meant a student is responsible and achievement oriented, a high score in extraversion meant a student is social, outgoing and assertive, a high score in agreeableness showed a student is trusting and cooperative and a high score in emotional stability showed a student is calm, secure and enthusiastic (Gupta and Gupta, 2020). While interpreting my results, I analyzed myself as lying in the traits of emotional stability and agreeableness, which means I am cooperative and can be trusted, and I am calm, secure and enthusiastic. However, I do have weaknesses and I would like to point out that I need improvement in two areas: I prefer to work alone, and I am reserved. Lower extroversion doesn’t mean that employees are less productive but they have slow speed to perform things, and that too, alone (Gupta and Gupta, 2020), whereas I should work collectively with my group or fellows. Secondly, I am easily distracted and a little disorganized, whereas I should improve myself and organize my work to be successful.
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Each student will have different results; many traits could be similar but there would be at least one trait that is unique to each individual. This model has received both criticism and approval, however, still gives a comprehensive approach in theory building and research on personality traits (De Raad and Mlačić, 2015) and is considered dominant method in representing the human personality trait structure (Eswaran et al, 2011). Literature states that personality is related differently to different dimensions of job performance (Rothmann and Coetzer, 2003). A study by Eswaran et al., (2011) discusses that the employees who are high in these dimensions would likely be good in job involvement and more prone towards multi-tasking in providing appropriate services to the customers in the banking/financial institutions. Mkoji and Sikalieh (2012) conducted a study on employees of the Kenya Medical Research Institute and found that most of the institute’s employees are largely composed of a conscientiousness personality trait, which was found to be connected to job performance at the institute. This means that “…personality is useful for predicting other work-related criteria, like job satisfaction and job performance” (Mkoji and Sikalieh, 2012).
We can see that the Big Five personality traits dimensions can be used to predict traits of individuals which are specified to various jobs. A manager may be a good team leader, show leadership traits, extrovert and emotional stability under stressed projects in one job, but might be weak in these areas in another type of job. I would conclude by saying that each organisation should test employees through their own ways so that they know which individual best suits their job and overall organizational goals. Cultural differences, languages, skills and capabilities, leadership style and team working skills, should all be considered according to the job designation.
