PSY332 LEC 3 - Personality+Leadership

Personality

• Consistencies in people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviours over time and across situations.

• Considered stable traits, but does/can change over time, situation.

Dispositional Approach

• Focused on people’s dispositions (how they conducted themselves) and their personalities.

• Assumed people possess stable traits/characteristics that influence attitudes and behaviour.

• Personality research experienced it’s first boom after WWII, where organizations started using personality tests for selection of military personnel (and in businesses in 1950s and 1960s).

Situational Approach (Bandura)

• Says behaviour is determined largely by situation or environment.

• Grounded in the Social Learning Theory.

Interactionist Approach (Mischel)

• Both nature and nuture work together to shape human behaviour.

• Strong vs Weak situations

  • Strong Situation → highly influence behaviour, supress individual traits, most people will respond similarly.

  • Weak Situation → minimally influence behaviour, allows individual traits to be expressed, people vary in how they respond

• Trait Activation Theory

Trait Activation Theory

• Proposes that personality traits are expressed through behaviour only when a specific situation provides cues relevant to that trait.

Big 5 Personality Traits

• Openess

• Conscientiousness

• Extraversion

• Agreeableness

• Neuroticism

Extraversion

• Refers to the degree to which an individual is outgoing, energetic, and sociable.

• Captures how much a person seeks stimulation in the company of others.

Ambiverts

• Personality not as stable as perviously thought.

• Life experiences, interventions, etc.

Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

• Extroversion vs introversion

• Sensing vs intuition

• Thinking vs feeling

• Judging vs perceiving/prospecting

Extroversion vs Introversion

• Similar to Big-5 dimension

Sensing vs Intuition

• Collecting information through senses versus through intuition, inspiration or subjective sources.

Thinking vs Feeling

• Processing and evaluating information, using rational logic vs personal values.

Judging vs Perceiving/Prospecting

• How you orient yourself to the world. Order and structure vs flexibility and spontaneity.

Jungian Personality Theory

• Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung identifies preferences for perceiving the environment and obtaining/processing information.

• MBTI based on this work.

Criticisms of the MBTI

• Empirical

  • Based on Jungian Theory, not grounded in data but in untested assumptions.

• Internal Consistency (reliability)

  • Using preferences (vs abilities or behaviours) increases the likelihood of multiple ‘types’ per person.

• Predictive Power (validitiy)

  • Uses self-report as basis for test and then assesses validity by asking testaker to verify accuracy.

• Testability (falsifiability)

  • MBTI avoids making strong (testable) claims

  • Vague nature of statements lends itself for Forer effects (i.e., true enough of most people)

Emotional Intelligence

• The ability to perceive, understand, and manage one’s own and other people’s emotions accurately and effectively.

Perceiving Emotions

• Correctly identify emotions expressed by people designs.

Managing Emotions

• Select best strategy to regulate one’s own, other’s emotions.

Understanding Emotions

• Predict others’ emotional responses to situations.

Using Emotions

• Select helpful emotion for addressing a particular situation.

Self-Monitoring

• An individual’s observation, regulation, and control of their expressive behaviour and self-presentation guided by social and situational cues.

• Captures interpersonal variation in the degree to which individual behaviour reflects interpersonal cues as opposed to inner affective states.

  • High and Low

High Self-Monitor

• Sensitive to external cues

• Behave differently in different situations.

Low Self-Monitor

• Not (as) sensitive to external cues

• Less likely to adjust their behaviours, more consistent across situations.

Leadership

• The ability to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward the achievement of a vision or set of goals (in this case the effectiveness of the organizations of which they are members).

Leading

1. Establish organizational mission.

2. Formulate strategy for implementing mission.

Managing

1. Implement organizational strategy

Leadership Perspectives

• Behavioural Theories

• Contingency and Situational Theories

• Transformational and “Full Range” Perspective

• New and Emerging Perspectives

• Trait Theories

Trait Theories

• Theories that consider personality traits to differentiate leaders from non-leaders.

• Leadership Traits:

  • Intelligence

  • Agency

  • Extroversion

  • Conscientiousness

  • Openess

  • Emotional Intelligence

• Traits can predict leadership outcomes, but they are better at predicting leader emergence than effectiveness.

Limitations of Trait Approach

• Gives few (if any) prescriptive instructions.

• Leadership Categorization Theory

• Traits only weakly related to leader performance

• Fails to consider the role of the situation (too many internal attributions).

Leadership Categorization Theory

• People are more likely to view somebody as a leader and to evaluate them as a more effective leader when they possesses prototypical characteristics of leadership.

Behavioural Theories

• What do leaders do?

• Behavioural patterns or leadership style (classic theories)

• Lewin’s leadership styles

Lewin’s Leadership Styles

• Autocratic — coach makes all the decisions

• Laissez-faire — limited input from the coach

• Democratic — shared decision making with the coach

Blake’s and Mouton’s Managerial Grid

• Country Club — low concern for task, high concern for people

• Team Leader — high concern for task, high concern for people

• Authoritarian — high concern for tasks, low concern for people

• Impoverished — low  concern for task, low concern for people

Contingency and Transactional Theories

• The situation and the needs of the employee determine effective leadership behaviours.

• Types:

  • Fiedler’s LPC Contingency Theory

  • Hershey and Blanchards Situational Leadership

  • House’s Path-Goal Theory

  • Leader member exchange

House’s Path-Goal Theory

• Concerned with the situations under which various leader behaviours are most effective.

• The most important activities of leaders are those that clarify the paths to various goals of interest to employees.

• The effective leader forms a connection between employee goals and organizational goals.

• 4 types of leader behaviour:

  • Directive — provides specific guidance

  • Supportive — satisfies subordinate needs

  • Participative — subordinates participate in decisions

  • Achievement-Oriented — sets challenging goals

Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) Model

• A relationship-based approach to leadership.

• Relationship changes over time: Stranger → Acquaintance → Maturity

• Quality of dyadic relationship predicts behaviour.

• Relatively low agreement between leader and follower in rating of relationship.