net 3 P A R T INDIVIDUAL CHARACTERISTICS CHAPTER 9 Personality and Cultural Values CHAPTER 10 Ability 9 www.net Personality and chapter Cultural Values ORGANIZATIONAL MECHANISMS Organizational Culture INDIVIDUAL Organizational MECHANISMS Structure GROUP Job MECHANISMS Satisfaction Leadership: INDIVIDUAL Styles & OUTCOMES Behaviors Stress Job Leadership: Performance Power & Negotiation Motivation Teams: Organizational Processes & Commitment Communication Trust, Justice, & Ethics Teams: Characteristics & Learning & Diversity Decision Making INDIVIDUAL CHARACTERISTICS Ability Personality & Cultural Values www.net © Mark Lennihan/AP Images L E A R N I N G G OA L S After reading this chapter, you should be able to answer the following questions: 9.1 What is personality? What are cultural values? 9.2 What are the “Big Five”? 9.3 Is personality driven by nature or by nurture? 9.4 What taxonomies can be used to describe personality, other than the Big Five? 9.5 What taxonomies can be used to describe cultural values? 9.6 How does personality affect job performance and organizational commitment? 9.7 Are personality tests useful tools for organizational hiring? www.net 268 C H A P T E R 9 Personality and Cultural Values CHIPOTLE H ow’s this for a Chipotle success story? Sahul Flores was But those traits also likely served him well as his job took on a 22-year-old spending the summer in Wisconsin, look- more and more leadership qualities. After all, leaders also need ing for a short-term job. When he wandered into one to be conscientious, and they also need to be enthusiastic! All of the Denver-based burrito chain’s locations, he was hired on of which brings us to what did wind up topping Flores’s already a part-time basis and asked to prepare the tortillas. He was rapid ascent.
One day a group of Chipotle executives, includ- promoted to kitchen manager 10 weeks later and apprentice ing founder Steve Ells, visited Flores’s Milwaukee location. manager 8 weeks after that. But the ladder climbing didn’t stop They were impressed, with Ells noting, “Do you know that you there. In another 5 months, he had moved to acting manager run your restaurant as good or better than I did the stores in and then general manager.
Recounts Flores, “In about a year I Denver?” went from crew to general manager, from making $7 bucks an The conversation with Ells led to Flores eventually being hour to a good salary with benefits and everything. It’s funny placed into Chipotle’s “restaurateur” program, an initiative that because you would think, in a year I got promoted, all these gives general managers stock options and a $10,000 bonus great things happened, how could you top that?” each time they train an employee who rises to the general Before answering Flores’s question, it’s important to explain manager level. Being put on the restaurateur track requires an some of the reasons he was likely hired and why he was pro- interview with Chipotle executives—presumably focusing on moted so quickly. Flores clearly embodies many of the person- many of the same personality traits noted earlier.
The company ality traits that Chipotle later began to explicitly emphasize in currently has 400 restaurateurs, with 40 percent of locations its hiring process, including conscientiousness, ambition, hospi- run by a manager in the program. That keeps conscientious, tableness, and infectious enthusiasm. Those traits likely served ambitious, hospitable, and enthusiastic people right where they Flores well in his first few weeks with Chipotle, as he worked to can help the company most: running their stores in a way that promote both customer satisfaction and coworker satisfaction. keeps their customers coming back for more.
PERSO NALIT Y AND CULTURAL VALUE S As the opening illustrates, a company can gain from paying close attention to the personality of its employees when making decisions about hiring and development. Personality refers to the structures and propensities inside people that explain their characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior.1 Personality creates people’s social reputations—the way they are per- ceived by friends, family, coworkers, and supervisors.2 In this way, personality captures what people are like. That’s in contrast to ability, the subject of Chapter 10, which captures what people can do. Although we sometimes describe people as having “a good personality,” per- sonality is actually a collection of multiple traits.
Traits are defined as recurring regularities or trends in people’s responses to their environment.3 Adjectives such as “responsible,” “easygo- ing,” “polite,” and “reserved” are examples of traits that can be used to summarize someone’s personality. As we’ll describe later, personality traits are a function of both your genes and your environ- 9. One important piece of the environmental part of that equation is the culture in which you What is personality? What were raised. Cultural values are defined as shared beliefs about desirable end states or modes are cultural values? of conduct in a given culture.4 You can think of cultural values as capturing what cultures are like.
Adjectives such as “traditional,” “informal,” “risk averse,” or “assertive” are all examples of values that can be used to summarize a nation’s culture. Cultural values can influence the devel- opment of people’s personality traits, as well as how those traits are expressed in daily life. In this way, a responsible person in the United States may act somewhat differently than a responsible person in China, just as an easygoing person in France may act somewhat differently than an easygoing person in Indonesia.net C H A P T E R 9 Personality and Cultural Values 269 HOW CAN WE DE SCRIBE WHAT EMPLOYEE S A R E LIKE? We can use personality traits and cultural values to describe what employees are like. For exam- ple, how would you describe your first college roommate to one of your classmates? You’d start off using certain adjectives—maybe the roommate was funny and outgoing or maybe frugal and organized.
Of course, it would take more than a few adjectives to describe your roommate fully. You could probably go on listing traits for several minutes, maybe even coming up with 100 traits or more. Although 100 traits may sound like a lot, personality researchers note that the third edition of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary contained 1,710 adjectives that can be used to describe someone’s traits!5 Was your roommate abrasive, adulterous, agitable, alarmable, antiso- cial, arbitrative, arrogant, asocial, audacious, aweless, and awkward? We hope not! THE BIG FIVE TAXONOMY With 1,710 adjectives, you might be worrying about the length of this chapter (or the difficulty of your next exam!). Fortunately, it turns out that most adjectives are variations of five broad 9.2 dimensions or “factors” that can be used to summarize our personalities.6 Those five personality What are the “Big Five”? dimensions include conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness to experience, and extraversion.
Collectively, these dimensions have been dubbed the Big Five.7 Figure 9-1 lists the traits that can be found within each of the Big Five dimensions. We acknowledge that it can be hard to remember the particular labels for the Big Five dimensions, and we wish there was some acronym that could make the process easier. FIGURE 9-1 Trait Adjectives Associated with the Big Five C A N O E Conscientiousness Agreeableness Neuroticism Openness Extraversion • Dependable • Kind • Nervous • Curious • Talkative • Organized • Cooperative • Moody • Imaginative • Sociable • Reliable • Sympathetic • Emotional • Creative • Passionate • Ambitious • Helpful • Insecure • Complex • Assertive • Hardworking • Courteous • Jealous • Refined • Bold • Persevering • Warm • Unstable • Sophisticated • Dominant NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT • Careless • Critical • Calm • Uninquisitive • Quiet • Sloppy • Antagonistic • Steady • Conventional • Shy • Inefficient • Callous • Relaxed • Conforming • Inhibited • Negligent • Selfish • At ease • Simple • Bashful • Lazy • Rude • Secure • Unartistic • Reserved • Irresponsible • Cold • Contented • Traditional • Submissive Sources: G. Saucier, “Mini-Markers: A Brief Version of Goldberg’s Unipolar Big-Five Markers,” Journal of Personality Assessment 63 (1994), pp.
Goldberg, “The Development of Markers for the Big-Five Factor Structure,” Psychological Assessment 4 (1992), pp., “Validation of the Five-Factor Model of Personality across Instruments and Observers,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52 (1987), pp. Hodgkinson, “Development and Validation of the Five-Factor Model Questionnaire (FFMQ): An Adjectival-Based Personality Inventory for Use in Occupational Settings,” Personnel Psychology 60 (2007), pp.net 270 C H A P T E R 9 Personality and Cultural Values Would you like to see what your Big Five profile looks like? Our OB Assessments feature will show you where you stand on each of the five dimensions. After you’ve gotten a feel for your personality profile, you might be wondering about some of the following questions: How does personality develop? Why do people have the traits that they possess? Will those traits change over time? All of these questions are variations on the “nature vs. nurture” debate: Is personality a function of our genes, or is it something that we develop as a function of our experiences and environment? As you might guess, it’s sometimes difficult to tease apart the impact of nature and nurture on personality.
Let’s assume for a moment that you’re especially extraverted and so are your parents. Does this mean you’ve inherited their “extraversion gene”? Or does it mean that you observed and copied their extraverted behavior during your childhood (and were rewarded with praise for doing so)? It’s impossible to know, because the effects of nature and nurture are acting in combination in this example. One method of separating nature and nurture effects is to study identical twins who’ve been 9.3 adopted by different sets of parents at birth. For example, the University of Minnesota has been Is personality driven by conducting studies of pairs of identical twins reared apart for several decades.8 Such studies find, nature or by nurture? for example, that extraversion scores tend to be significantly correlated across pairs of identical twins.9 Such findings can clearly be attributed to “nature,” because identical twins share 100 percent of their genetic material, but cannot be explained by “nurture,” because the twins were raised in different environments.
A review of several different twin studies concludes that genes have a significant impact on people’s Big Five profile. More specifically, 49 percent of the varia- tion in extraversion is accounted for by genetic differences.10 The genetic impact is somewhat smaller for the rest of the Big Five: 45 percent for openness, 41 percent for neuroticism, 38 per- cent for conscientiousness, and 35 percent for agreeableness. Another method of examining the genetic basis of personality is to examine changes in person- ality traits over time. Longitudinal studies require participants to complete personality assessments at multiple time periods, often separated by several years.
If personality has a strong genetic com- ponent, then people’s Big Five profiles at, say, age 21 should be very similar to their profiles at age 50. Figure 9-2 summarizes the results of 92 studies that assessed personality changes in more FIGURE 9-2 Changes in Big Five Dimensions over the Life Span 1 Standardized Mean Changes in Personality Conscientiousness Agreeableness 0 Neuroticism Openness Extraversion −1 10-18 18-22 22-30 30-40 40-50 50-60 60-70 Age Ranges Source: Adapted from B. Viechtbauer, “Patterns of Mean-Level Change in Personality Traits across the Life Course: A Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal Studies,” Psychological Bulletin 132 (2006), pp.net C H A P T E R 9 Personality and Cultural Values 271 OB ASSESSMENTS THE BIG FIVE What does your personality profile look like? This assessment is designed to measure the five major dimensions of personality: conscientiousness (C), agreeableness (A), neuroticism (N), openness to experience (O), and extraversion (E). Listed below are phrases describing people’s behaviors.
Please write a number next to each statement that indicates the extent to which it accurately describes you. Answer each question using the response scale provided. Then subtract your answers to the bold- faced questions from 6, with the difference being your new answer for those questions.