Personality, Perception, Attribution & Attitudes and Values

Understanding individuals is not that easy as it can be seen. Each person has a different personality and the way he/she behaves is the result of different interactions the person has, as well as his/her personal differences.

Some scholars have stablished some theories about personality.

1. 
   
   Gordon Allport and his Trait Theory explains personality in terms the comparision between variables.

He argues that a characteristic of Extraversion explains personality in the way a person is more sociable or reserved. A second important fact is the Agreeableness of the people. People can be war or antagonistic depending on a certain circumstance they are involved in. In order to know if a person is hardworking or unreliable, he consideres the term Conscientousness to explain this conduct. The Emotional Stability gives an idea of how the people used to behave and face day to day problems; people can be calm or insecure in this case. Finally, he analyses how much Openness to experience is a person in terms of creativity or narrow interests bring a person when giving response to a certain responsibility or situation more related in an organization environment.

    2.   Freud analyzed the personality of individuals in his Psychodynamic Theory.

He said that there are a lot of unconscious factors explaing personality and emphasized in the important of them as principal determinants of behavior.

    3.  Carl Rogers stablisched the Humanitarian Theory.

In this theory people are supossed to be able to actualize themselves in order to growth and improve their behaviorand their ways of conduct.

In order to know what are the main factors that make a person differs from  one another, there are some influential personality characterisctis for the process of self evaluation. The first one talks about locus of control, referred to ability of the people to control what happens to them. It differenciates the internal and external factors that help people to understand their environment and feelings. The second characteristic is self-steem, which analizes how a high or low steem influences the workplace and the attitudes facing different situations. In the third place, self-efficacy explains how individuals think they perform a specific task. They know themselves and have set a clear vision of what they can better do and what not. The fourth characteristic is self-monitoring. Individuals must know how is the best way to react in certains circumstances and what is changing all around their environment. However individuals can react from internal feelings and this condition of monitoring is not well performed any more, even when deciding if a low or high sel-monitoring is better which is difficult to say.

When talking about perceptions it is important to say that as well as in personality, each person perceives a situation in a different way. Perceptions are influences by individual`s view of the world, as their expectations, feelings, values, beliefs, language, experience, self-image, among others, which make the perception of the reality disimilar.

Source: http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/images/2008/10/16/perception.jpg  

 

The foundation of perceptions are based on what we think. However, what we say and do influence the way people perceive us.

In organizations, the perception of someone is influenced by factors such stereotypes, judgements, mood, among others, that do not allow people clearly define how is somebody and which are his/her intentions. These factors are usually considered as the principal barriers between the perceiver and the target. 

Attributions are generallt referred as "a concept in social psychology referring to how individuals explain causes of events, other's behaviour, and their own behaviour."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_(psychology. What we perceived externally and internally from others influence the way a person behaves. The internal attributions are related with the personality of the people and the external attributions with the situation he/she is involved in.

Attitude is a hypothetical construct that represents an individual's degree of like or dislike for an item. Attitudes are generally positive or negative views of a person, place, thing, or event-- this is often referred to as the attitude object. People can also be conflicted or ambivalent toward an object, meaning that they simultaneously possess both positive and negative attitudes toward the item in question.

Attitudes are judgments. They develop on the ABC model (affect, behavior, and cognition). The affective response is an emotional response that expresses an individual's degree of preference for an entity. The behavioral intention is a verbal indication or typical behavioral tendency of an individual. The cognitive response is a cognitive evaluation of the entity that constitutes an individual's beliefs about the object. Most attitudes are the result of either direct experience or observational learning from the environment.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attitude_(psychology)

Attitudes are linked to behavior, can be favorable or unfavorable and are explained like a psychological tendency. As it was explained before, there are some models explaining attributions. Here the ABC Model:

Source: http://www.mikethementor.co.uk/

The introduction of the concept cognitive dissonance let us to understand the relation between attitudes and behavior. In organizations is quite often to see someone who is loved by everybody, optimistic, but does not want more responsibilities than he/she has and that is not willing to cooperate with the company when there are integrations or when somebody needs one specific information. These kind of people try to have always a positive attitude but his/her behavior is inconsistent with it.

According to values, consisting of certain beliefs about preferable conducts, we can divide them in instrumental or terminal values. The first ones accept behaviors related with ambition, honest, etc; while the terminal values are related with the goals to be achieved like love or hapiness. 

(Discussion above is based on the information of the slides provided by Cristina Robledo. Organizational Behavior & National and Organizational Culture. July 2010).

Please explain, using your own words, the concept of Pygmalion Effect.

Pygmalion effect refers to the idea of the higher the expectations of employees, the better they perform. There are some people that believe in their negative capacity and have low expectations but in the other hand, employees who believe in themselves and have higher expectations are more willing to succeed.