Personality, Perception and Attitude

Two equally qualified officers join a bank branch. One takes every customer complaint in her stride; the other loses sleep over each one. Their skills are the same; their personalities differ.

Personality is unique to each person and relatively consistent. It is shaped by genetics, environment, experience and learning. At work it matters for recruitment, communication, team dynamics, leadership, motivation, job satisfaction and performance.

The Big Five (OCEAN) is the trait model with the strongest research support. Each trait is a scale, and every person sits somewhere along it.

An example. On a college fest committee, the highly conscientious member keeps the budget, and the extravert handles sponsors. The member high on openness designs the new event.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), developed by Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers from Carl Jung's psychological types, sorts people into types along four dimensions. Each dimension is a two-way choice, so there are 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 = 16 types. ESTJ, for example, is extraversion, sensing, thinking and judging. It is used to understand team compatibility, leadership styles and communication preferences.

Don't confuse the MBTI with the Big Five. The MBTI sorts people into types: you are E or I. The Big Five scores each trait on a scale: you are more or less extraverted. Neuroticism is not an illness; it is the low end of emotional stability.

Where it breaks. The MBTI is popular in training, but its types predict job performance poorly, and people often get a different type when retested. Traits predict behaviour on average, not in every situation. Strong situations, such as strict rules or an emergency, override personality.

In practice. Use personality to place and develop people, not to label them. In hiring, a validated measure of conscientiousness tells you more than an MBTI type.

Go deeper for practitioners

Other traits exams ask about.

• Locus of control (Julian Rotter): internals believe they control what happens to them; externals credit luck or other people.
• Type A and Type B (Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman): Type A people are impatient, competitive and hurried; Type B people are relaxed.
• Self-monitoring (Mark Snyder): high self-monitors adjust their behaviour to the situation; low self-monitors act the same everywhere.
• Machiavellianism: pragmatic, emotionally distant, and willing to believe that ends justify means.
• Self-esteem: how far people like or dislike themselves.

A decision. You are hiring ten officers for a new branch. A vendor offers an MBTI workshop to "find the right types". Evidence favours structured interviews and a validated conscientiousness measure for selection. The MBTI may still help a team talk about how its members prefer to work.

Personality is who you are, fairly steadily, from one situation to the next.

Two brothers grow up in the same house in Jaipur. One is talkative and quick to anger; the other is quiet and patient. Then one moves to a bank job in Mumbai and turns out more assertive than anyone at home expected. What made each of them as they are?

The word comes from the Latin persona, the mask an actor wore on the Roman stage. It points to the role a person shows to others, though modern psychology also counts the inner pattern behind that role.

Textbooks group the determinants in different ways. Many exam answers use three: heredity, environment and situation. A longer list splits environment into culture, family and social groups.

Back to the brothers. Shared family and culture explain much of what they have in common. Heredity and different friendships explain why they differ. The move to Mumbai shows the situation at work: new demands bring out a side that the old setting never called for.

Don't confuse heredity with fixed destiny. Heredity sets a range, not a result. Study notes often call personality "inherited and learned" as if the two could be separated. In practice they work together, and no one can say what percentage of any one person's personality comes from each.

Where it breaks. The five-way list overlaps: family is part of culture, and the workplace is a social group. Heredity can only be studied indirectly, for example by comparing relatives, so claims about exact shares should be treated with care.

In practice. A manager cannot change what an employee inherited, but can change the situation: clear roles, fair rules and a supportive team bring out better behaviour. This is also why a person's behaviour in an interview may differ from behaviour on the job.

For exams. Know the three-way list (heredity, environment, situation) and the five-way list, and Allport's definition. The link between personality and behaviour in general is covered in Values, Learning and Motivation.

A sales head hits every target and is praised by senior management. Yet three of his juniors have quit, each saying he took credit for their work. His results are real; so is the damage. Some personality traits help a person in one way and hurt others in another.

Study notes sometimes list the Dark Triad under "socially desirable" traits. That is wrong: these are the socially undesirable ones. In OB, the three are treated as traits that run from low to high in ordinary people, not as medical diagnoses.

Other traits that predict work behaviour. The chapter has already named locus of control, self-esteem and self-monitoring. Here is what the first two mean for the job, along with one more trait, risk-taking.

An example. A stock trader who waits for full information misses the chance, so a high risk-taker fits. An auditor who guesses can miss a fraud, so a careful one fits. The aim is to match the trait to the job, since neither level of risk-taking is better in itself.

Don't confuse Machiavellianism with ambition. An ambitious person wants to rise and may do so fairly. A high-Mach person treats others as tools and accepts deception to win.

Where it breaks. Dark traits are usually measured by self-report, and people with these traits may not describe themselves honestly. A situation with clear rules and close supervision can hold such behaviour in check. Labelling someone "a narcissist" on the strength of one bad meeting is itself a perceptual error.

In practice. Check references and past conduct, not just charm, when hiring for senior roles. Build clear rules, open credit-giving and honest feedback so that no one can profit by taking advantage of others.

In an appraisal meeting, one manager sees a confident young officer who speaks well. Another sees someone who talks more than he delivers. Same person, same year's work, two readings.

Perception is subjective: the same situation can draw different responses because people's experiences and expectations differ. People act on what they perceive, not on what is objectively there.

Three sets of factors shape perception: the perceiver (motives, experiences, attitudes, expectations), the target (appearance, behaviour, communication style) and the situation (context, time, work setting).

Attribution theory (Harold Kelley) explains how we judge the cause of someone's behaviour. Was it internal, coming from the person, or external, coming from the situation? We use three cues.

An example. An officer reaches the branch an hour late. If most of the staff were late that morning, consensus is high, and the manager blames the traffic. If she is often late, and late for meetings too, consistency is high and distinctiveness low. Then the manager blames her.

In the appraisal meeting, the first manager may show a halo effect: good speaking colours the whole rating. A related error is judging an idea by who said it, rather than by its merits.

Don't confuse the halo effect with stereotyping. The halo effect spreads one trait of a person across the whole judgement of that person. Stereotyping judges a person by the group they belong to. Likewise, the fundamental attribution error is about how we judge others; the self-serving bias is about how we judge ourselves.

Where it breaks. Good intentions do not remove these errors, because they work below awareness. Process does more: structured interviews with the same questions for everyone, written criteria, and more than one rater.

In practice. Perception decides hiring, appraisals and promotions. Before rating someone, ask which cue you used and what evidence you have from the whole period.

Go deeper for practitioners

The self-fulfilling prophecy. What we expect of people can shape what they do. In Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson's classroom study, published in 1968, teachers were told that some pupils, in fact chosen at random, would bloom. Those pupils gained more on a later test. This is called the Pygmalion effect. Later studies found the effect real but usually smaller. A manager who expects little from a new officer may give her less attention and fewer chances, and so get less.

A decision. Your best salesperson misses target for one quarter. Everyone else in the region also fell short, after a competitor cut prices. Consensus is high, so the situation is the likelier cause. Blaming her effort would be the fundamental attribution error, and could cost you a strong performer.

Select, organise, interpret.

A kirana store's new assistant believes customers should be served well, yet he feels irritated by them and avoids the counter. What he thinks, what he feels and what he does do not line up. Attitude theory explains how they fit together.

An attitude is a learned tendency to respond consistently, in a favourable or unfavourable way. It combines beliefs, feelings and an intention to behave. It influences job satisfaction, motivation and organisational commitment.

Cognitive is what you think, affective what you feel, behavioural what you are ready to do.

Cognitive dissonance. Leon Festinger (1957) showed that people feel uncomfortable when their attitudes clash with each other or with their behaviour. They reduce the discomfort by changing the attitude, changing the behaviour, or explaining the clash away. The kirana assistant might decide that "difficult customers are not worth serving well", which changes the belief to fit the behaviour.

Three attitudes matter most at work.

• Job satisfaction is the positive or negative feeling toward one's job, role and work environment. High satisfaction supports commitment and performance.
• Organisational commitment is emotional attachment and loyalty to the organisation. Strong commitment can reduce turnover and absenteeism. John Meyer and Natalie Allen describe three forms: affective (I want to stay), continuance (I need to stay) and normative (I ought to stay).
• Job involvement is how far a person identifies with their job and treats it as important to their self-worth.

Why it costs money. As an illustration, suppose a branch of 20 staff loses 5 people a year. If replacing each costs about ₹2 lakh in hiring and training, turnover costs 5 × ₹2 lakh = ₹10 lakh a year. Raising commitment so that only 2 leave would save 3 × ₹2 lakh = ₹6 lakh.

Attitudes are formed by family and early experience, by peer groups and society, by the organisational environment (leadership, rewards, recognition, communication) and by personal experience of success and failure.

Don't confuse job involvement with organisational commitment. Involvement is attachment to the job itself; commitment is attachment to the employer. A doctor can be deeply involved in medicine and still feel no loyalty to the hospital that employs her.

Where it breaks. Attitudes predict behaviour only loosely. The link is stronger when the attitude is strong, specific to the behaviour and based on direct experience. It is weaker when social pressure pushes the other way. Across many studies, satisfaction and performance are only moderately related, and a satisfied employee may still leave for better pay.

In practice. Attitude surveys show where trouble is building before people leave. Robbins and Judge sort responses to dissatisfaction into four kinds: exit (leaving), voice (speaking up), loyalty (waiting for things to improve) and neglect (letting work slide).

For exams. Know the three components and match examples to them, the three work attitudes, Festinger's cognitive dissonance, and Meyer and Allen's three forms of commitment.

A student reads two textbook definitions of attitude, one by Allport and one by Katz and Stotland, and finds them worded very differently. Do they describe the same thing? They do, and exams expect the wording and the author for each.

• Allport (1935): a mental and neural state of readiness, organised through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence on the individual's response to all objects and situations with which it is related.
• Krech and Crutchfield: an enduring organisation of motivational, emotional, perceptual and cognitive processes with respect to some aspect of the individual's world.
• Katz and Stotland (1959): a tendency or predisposition to evaluate an object, or the symbol of that object, in a certain way.

Study notes sometimes print the last name as "Scotland" and Allport's "neural" as "neutral". Both are copying slips.

Characteristics of attitudes.

• They are learned, not inborn, and can be anywhere from very favourable to very unfavourable.
• They are directed at an object: a person, a policy, an event or an idea.
• They vary in strength. Strong attitudes predict behaviour better.
• They can be explicit, which a person knows about and can state, or implicit, which operates without awareness yet still affects behaviour.
• They are fairly stable but can change, as with Festinger's cognitive dissonance.

An example. A manager says in meetings that women make good engineers (explicit attitude). Yet he keeps assigning site visits to men, without noticing (implicit attitude). Only a look at who gets which work reveals the second attitude.

Two more job attitudes. Besides satisfaction, commitment and involvement, textbooks list two more.

POS comes from Robert Eisenberger and colleagues (1986). It works through reciprocity: people who feel supported tend to repay it with more commitment and effort.

Don't confuse perceived organisational support with job satisfaction. Satisfaction is how you feel about the job's content and conditions. POS is what you believe about the organisation's attitude toward you.

Where it breaks. The word "perceived" matters: support that managers believe they give counts for little unless employees see it. Surveys of these attitudes show association with outcomes such as lower turnover, not proof of cause.

For exams. Know the three definitions with their authors, the explicit and implicit distinction, and the five job attitudes: satisfaction, involvement, organisational commitment, POS and engagement.