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Personality Essay

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In this essay I will be looking at two aspects of personality and the effect that personality traits have on behaviour within organisations. “Personality is the overall profile or combination of traits that characterize the unique nature of a person” (Ray French). This is just one of many definitions for personality, however all definitions linked to trait theory share the same key aspects, that personality consists of internal traits and characteristics that have an effect upon a person’s behaviour. There are thousands of different personality traits that can contribute to making up a person’s personality and influence the way they may act in a given situation. These traits can be broken down into five key dimensions which can then try …show more content…

Low levels of emotional stability are negatively correlated with job satisfaction and are therefore likely to lead to deviant behaviour in the workplace. Organisational deviance is when an individual either withholds effort or steals form an organisation. Low levels of emotional stability is positively correlated with organisational deviance, so people who have high levels of emotional stability are less likely to steal or with hold effort (Sean P. Neubert). Grays Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory (1970) looks at how individuals in the work place may react or become aroused to reinforcements and rewards and there sensitivity to these (cook thesis). (wikiversity) As the graph above shows performance in neurotic people (low stability) will perform better at lower levels of arousal and as arousal increases performance will drop, whereas performance will be higher for extroverts at a higher level of arousal but lower at lower levels of arousal. This however works on the basis of Yerkes-Dodson’s theory which suggests there is an optimum level of arousal that an individual performs best at. When looking at adjustment, as levels of emotional stability decrease, so does an individual’s sensitivity to reinforcement (Gray, 1970). So people with very low levels of emotional stability tend to have exaggerated responses to reinforcement and rewards (Pickering, Corr, &

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