Personality.
We are all different. Some of us are quiet and passive whilst others are loud and aggressive. Is there personalities better suited for certain jobs? Before we can begin to answer this we first need to define what “personality” is.
What Is Personality
When we talk of personality, we do not mean a person has charm, a positive attitude toward life or a smiling face. These are merely effects of personality. When psychologists talk of personality, they mean a dynamic concept describing the growth and development of a person’s whole psychological system.
Defining Personality
The most frequent official definition of personality was founded by Gordon Allport just over 70 years ago. He said personality is “the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychological systems that determine his unique adjustments to his environment”. Not an easy definition. For our case or purpose, you can think of personality as the sum of total ways in which an individual reacts to and interact with others.
Measuring Personality
The most important reason managers need to know on how to measure personality, is that research has shown personality tests are useful in hiring decisions and help managers forecast who is best for a job. The most common means of measuring personality is through self-report surveys where individuals evaluate themselves on a series of factors, for example “I consider myself more happy when I work in a team”. These types of surveys work well if they are correctly made but they also have a weakness. If the respondent knows the survey is for a job, he might alter the answer for a better chance to get the job rather than being true to himself. Another problem is about the accuracy, or rather the time when being conducted. The respondent might be in a bad mood and therefore the scores will be less accurate.
Personality Determinants
Personality appears (after many debates) to be a result of both heredity and environmental factors. Research has however tended to support heredity over environment.
Heredity refers to factors determined at conception, such as physical stature, facial attributes, gender, muscle composition, reflexes and your entire biological rhythm. These are all generally considered to be either substantially or completely influenced by your who your parents are. The heredity approach argues that the ultimate explanation of an individual’s personality is the molecular structure of the genes, located in the chromosomes.
As an interesting example, researchers have studied thousands of identical twins who were separated at birth and raised separately. If heredity played little or no part in determining personality, then these twins should have little in common. But. Twins raised apart have much in common, for almost every behavioral trait, a significant part of the similarity between them turns out to be associated with genetic factors. In some cases, twins raised apart turned out to drive the same brand of car, smoke the same brand of cigarettes and even had the same name of their dogs. Even leisure activities showed similarities.
Interestingly, twin studies have suggested parents do not add much to our personality developments as we grow up. The personalities of identical twins raised in different households are more similar to each other than to the personalities of siblings with whom the twins were raised.
This is not to suggest personality never changes. People’s scores on measures of dependability tend to increase over time, as when young adults take on roles like starting a family and establishing a career that require great responsibility.
Early work on the structure of personality tried to identify and label enduring characteristics that describe an individual’s behavior, including shy, aggressive, submissive, lazy, loyal and timid. When someone exhibits these characteristics in a large number of situations, we call them personality traits of that person. The more these traits are shown, the more important they are in describing the person.