Business Management

The factors influencing individual at work

The individual behavior at work according to john ivancevich and Michael Mattson are influenced by different factors like personality, perception, attitude, abilities and skills.

Personality
Personality usually refers to the characteristics and distinctive traits of an individual, and the way how he responds and adjusts to other people and situations, personality is influenced though by many factors like heredity, family, society, culture and situation.
In psychology, personality is the patterns of behavior, thought, and emotion unique to an individual, and the ways they interact to help or hinder the adjustment of a person to other people and situations. A number of theories have attempted to explain human personality. In his psychoanalytic interpretation, Sigmund Freud asserted that the human mind could be divided into three significant components—the id, the ego, and the superego—which work together (or come into conflict) to shape personality. Psychoanalysis, name given by Sigmund Freud to a system of interpretation and therapeutic treatment of psychological disorders. Psychoanalysis emphasizes unconscious motivations and the conflicts between primal urges and learned social mores, stressing the importance of early childhood experiences in determining mature personality. Burrhus Frederic, American psychologist, suggests that an individual's personality is developed through external stimuli. In the behaviorist model, personality can change significantly with a shift to a new environment. Social-learning theorists, notably Albert Bandura, also emphasized environmental influences but pointed out that these work in conjunction with forces such as memory and feelings to determine personality.

Now what are the big 5 factors of personality traits?
The "big five" are broad categories of personality traits. Usually human resources professional use these 5 factor dimension in order to place employee, because these dimensions are considered to be the underlying trait that create an overall individual personality. The big 5 are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neurotic or (ocean).
Openness
It is usually referred to people who like to learn new things and new experience for its own sake. Openness includes the person being imaginative, insightful, adventurous, and having a wide variety of interests.
Conscientiousness
It describes people who are organized, motivated, reliable and prompt, they are usually striving to achieve their goals, have a wide range of resources, self-disciplines, cautious.
Extraversion
Extravert’s people get their energy from interacting with others, while introverts get their energy from within themselves. Extraverts are very enthusiastic especially when dealing with others, they are very friendly, cheerful, very active, seek for excitement but assertive at the same time.
Agreeableness
These types of individuals are friendly, cooperative and compassionate, modest, they are the type of people that u can trust thanks to their strong morality and values; they are as well kind and affectionate.
Neuroticism
It is also called sometimes emotional stability; it describes the person’s emotional stability and the degree of negative emotions. Usually people described as neurotic are often experiencing emotional instability and negative emotions as they are moody and tense most of the time and they can get angry very easy, they are anxious about the minimum events that might happen to their life even if it’s not very significant.

The interpretation of these personality traits, allow us to make statements, interpretations about the individual life, interest, life satisfaction. These big 5 traits are important predictors of job performance if employees have considerable autonomy. As the individual personality affects immediately his work behavior. Researchers found out that the scale of personality is related to work behavior or job performance for example sales executives with an extraversion personality usually show good performance at their job as sales job requires great deal with social contacts, similarly, an employee of accounting job with high neurotic attitude will be having a high value to the company. So personality and productivity are highly correlated for jobs where interpersonal interactions are high.

Perception Perception is the process by which people translate sensory impressions into a coherent and unified view of the world around them. Though necessarily based on incomplete and unverified (or unreliable) information, perception is equated with reality for most practical purposes and guides human behavior in general.
Behavior in the workplace is based on people’s perception of the workplace. There are many factors that influence how something is perceived. These factors might involve the person’s attitudes, motives, interests, experience and expectations. In terms of perceptions, research has shown that what employees perceive from their work situation influences their productivity most. Therefore, to influence productivity, it is necessary for employers to assess how workers perceive their jobs. Likewise, absenteeism, turnover and job satisfaction have more to do with an employee’s perception of the job. Those individuals who perceive their jobs as negative are likely to have increased absenteeism, more frequent turnover and less job satisfaction. The only way to influence these variables is to understand how an employee subjectively perceives the workplace .Consequently, perception influences decision-making within an organization. Take the example of the interview. Within the first few minutes of the interview, the interviewer has learned some information about the interviewee and has formed an impression based on various perceptions. The interviewer then decides whether the candidate is a good fit with the company

Attitudes

A predisposition or a tendency to respond positively or negatively towards a certain idea, object, person, or situation. Attitude influences an individual’s choice of action, and responses to challenges, incentives, and rewards (together called stimuli). Four major components of attitude are (1) Affective: emotions or feelings. (2) Cognitive: belief or opinions held consciously. (3) Conative: inclination for action. (4) Evaluative: positive or negative response to stimuli

The relationship between attitude and behavior has a strong impact on the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment. The relationship between attitude and behavior has been studied vastly and has been determined that the two exist on a continuum. Attitude and behavior also have moderators such as intention to change one’s attitude, which in turn changes one’s behavior. Attitude precedes behavioral action. And there are many factors that can influence this relationship, for example I might be working in an organization and I am feeling committed somehow to it but the salary I am getting at the end of every month is not satisfying for the work I am doing for them. Therefore, the balance between my behavior (organizational commitment) and my attitude (job satisfaction) are not in line with one another.

Learning
Learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience. Knowledge results from the combination of grasping experience and transforming it. - Kolb (1984, 41), it is a continuous process grounded in experience, it requires the resolution of conflicts between dialectically opposed modes of adaptation to the world (learning is by nature full of tension).
Learning involves transactions between the person and the environment. It is the process of creating knowledge that is the result of the transaction between social knowledge and personal knowledge.
Kolb's learning theory sets out four distinct learning styles, which are based on a four-stage learning cycle. In this respect, Kolb's model differs from others since it offers both a way to understand individual learning styles, which he named the "Learning Styles Inventory" (LSI), and also an explanation of a cycle of experiential learning that applies to all learners.
Kolb’s learning model is based on two continuums that forms a quadrant