Introduction to Individual Differences and Personality Traits

Vocabulary flashcards covering core concepts of organizational individual differences, personality traits, the Big Five, MBTI limitations, locus of control, and emotional intelligence.

Personality

The stable patterns in feelings, cognitive styles, and behaviors that make someone the same person from one situation to another, evaluated as an average across a domain of behaviors.

Traits

Individual differences that are stable over time, keeping the same across hours, days, or decades (such as personality, abilities, and values).

States

Individual differences that vary over time and across situations within the same person, such as mood, stress, and motivation.

Conscientiousness

A Big Five personality trait characterized by being dependable, organized, reliable, ambitious, hardworking, and persevering; it is the only trait that predicts job performance across all jobs.

Agreeableness

A Big Five personality trait describing the ability to get along with others, characterized by being kind, cooperative, sympathetic, helpful, courteous, and warm.

Neuroticism

A Big Five personality trait describing a person's tendency to experience negative emotions such as frustration or panic in response to situations.

Emotional Stability

The opposite of neuroticism, describing a person's tendency to remain relatively calm under stress rather than experiencing extreme negative emotions.

Openness

A Big Five personality trait describing a person's interest in abstract ideas, thinking, and beauty, characterized as curious, imaginative, creative, complex, refined, and sophisticated.

Extraversion

A Big Five personality trait describing someone who is talkative, sociable, passionate, assertive, bold, and dominant.

Lexical Hypothesis

The scientific idea initiated by Allport in 1936 proposing that important human personality traits and individual differences are naturally encoded into human language over generations.

Honesty-Humility

A trait missing from the Big Five but present in the HEXACO model, defined by sincerity, fairness, greed avoidance, and modesty; it is the single best predictor of bad workplace behaviors.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

A highly popular but invalid personality test that classifies people into discrete types using four dichotomies, failing to measure neuroticism and suffering from poor test-retest reliability.

Locus of Control

A personality trait reflecting the extent to which people believe their circumstances are a function of their own actions or external factors beyond their control.

Internals

Individuals with an internal locus of control who believe outcomes are primarily driven by their own effort, motivation, and actions.

Externals

Individuals with an external locus of control who attribute success or failure to luck, external forces, or outside factors beyond their control.

Self-Efficacy

A personality trait reflecting a person's general belief in their own capability to perform tasks and succeed across different situations.

Authoritarianism

A characteristic lying at the boundary of values and personality, defined as the belief that power and status differences are appropriate within hierarchical social systems like organizations.

Counterproductive Work Behavior

Intentional bad behavior in the workplace, which is strongly predicted by low scores in the honesty-humility trait.

Emotional Intelligence (EQ)

The ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, discriminate among them, and use this information to guide thinking and actions.