Personality, Perception and Attribution + Attitudes and Values

When talking about personality, perception, attribution, attitudes and values, where are referring to variables that influence individual behavior and group dynamics. Because of this, it is very important to understand each of this variables.

Personality can be define as relatively stable set of characteristics that influences an individual’s behavior(1) that is determined by heredity and the environment. There are many theories in order to understand this variable.

First there is the Trait Theory by Gordon Allport, this theory try to understand individual by identifying observable and stable traits in the behavior of a certain individual for example the Big Five Personality Traits.

Second we have the Psychodynamic Theory, which focused on the unconscious determinants of behavior.

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Third there is the , emphasized individual growth and improvement.

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Lastly there is a Integrative Approach, which describes personality as a composite of individual characteristics and situational variables.

Inside the organization, it is possible to identify some personality characteristics. The first one is Locus of Control that can be internal ( i control what happen to me) and external (people and circumstances control what happen to me). The second one is Self-Esteem that refers to how worth someone feels of itself so it can be either positive or negative. Third one is Self-Efficacy which means what a individual believes in terms of accomplishing a specific task. The forth one is Self-Monitoring this refers to behavior based on cues from people and situations. The fifth one and final its Positive/Negative Effect, which refers to the acceptances of positive aspects or the accentuation of negative aspects.

Perception is about how people interpret information about another person based on perceiver, target and situational characteristics, but this is not done without some barrier such as Selective perception, Stereotyping, First-impression error, Implicit personality theory, Self-fulfilling prophecies

Attribution explains how individuals explain the causes of the behavior of themselves or others, these causes can be internal (person) or external (Situation).

Attitudes refers to feelings, negatives or positives, about aspects of our environment. Attitudes also reflect the way a person will behave but there might be incongruence between both and it is known as cognitive dissonance. At the work place, there are two particular attitudes that have the greatest potential to influence how people behave. These are job satisfaction and organizational commitment.

Values refer to stable beliefs that people have an consider important to them according to a cultural background, what is important to me might no be for someone else. For example achievement, concern for others, honesty, fairness and so on.

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

What are the potential implications, uses, or challenges that this effect may pose for organizations engaging into international operations that require the understanding of diverse cultural contexts? Can you use this concept to explain the relationship between national and organizational cultures?

The Pygmalion Effect is a way to understand how our expectations about someone else can affect the way they will perform when we interact with them, as we unconsciously will display a special treatment base on our expectations toward those people, and they at the same time will internalize those expectations and transform them in a accordingly behavior. So for example if a sells manager expects its subordinates to reach the organizational goals, this manager treat his subordinates in a positive way, then they will internalize this positive feeling and will externalize in a way that they will perform better in order to achieve the goal, whereas if the expectations are negative then the result will be negative as well.

The Pygmalion effect appears a every important phenomenon to be understand by any organization, but especially those corporations that are engaged in international operations as they are the ones with most conflicts when trying to set up and operation in a different country because many times they do not realized of the danger of not understanding the cultural context of the people they are employing abroad. The problems appear when people from one country goes to another country with out really understanding the national culture of the host country, because this lack of knowledge crates stereotypes. The danger of stereotypes is that most of them tend to be in a negative context and most of the time stereotypes do not even group the majority of the people of a nation, and what occurs is that people creates bad expectation of others because of them. So by understanding this problem from the point of the Pygmalion effect, organizations will become conscious that negative expectations will create conflicts and lose of performance, and will realize the importance of understanding the culture of the host country in order to train managers able to understands others people culture, and in this way managers will create good expectations of the people they have in charged, which will be traduce in better performance of the employees. It important to say that cross-cultural training is neither easy nor for everyone, because people might find many of other people values incompatible with each own values, so people fit for this kind of training has to be carefully chosen in order to select openminded and caring individual.

I would say that this concept does not explain the relation of national culture and organizational culture, because the Pygmalion effect refers to a concept for understanding behavior of an individual and does not show any linkage to explain any relationship between national and organizational culture concepts, but what it does is that it makes us realize the importance of understanding both types of cultures in order to avoid value conflicts that creates negative expectations over a group and that finally leads to conflict, stress and demotivation of people, whereas healthy and positive environments produced significantly important improvements of performance of people within an organization.

Sources:

• (1) Nelson, Debra L. and Quick, James Campbell. 2010. Organisational Behavior – Science, the Real World, and You. South-Western Cengage Learning, Mason, USA. Chapter 1 and 2. Pp. 78
• Image 1, Talya Bauer, Berrin Erdoga, Organizational Behavior, Chapter 3
• Image 2, http://articles.directorym.net/Psychodynamic_Perspectives_Richmond_VA-r1047481-Richmond_VA.html
• Image 3, http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/rogers.html
• Takao Inamori, Farhad Analoui, Beyond Pygmalion Effect: The role of managerial perception, Journal of Management Development, vol. 29 Iss: 4, pp. 306-32