How Is Personality Useful to Managers in Organizations?

778 Words4 Pages
As Wikipedia puts it, “personality is not just who we are, it is a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed by a person that uniquely influences his or her cognitions, emotions, motivations and behaviors in various situations”. Therefore, if I were to write it in one sentence, I would describe personality as an ensemble of psychological factors coming together to shape and describe a person. Personality can be modeled, transformed and affected by the environment and the situation one finds itself in, it can be measured in different ways and used in as well as affect the organization in which one works therefore making it an important factor in one’s job performance and career success. In understanding how personality affects our abilities in organizations, it is important to acknowledge how it is perceived, measured and classified. In this essay I will thereby discuss and try to answer the subject of personality. * What is personality? As previously said rather than being just “who a person is”, personality is a group of traits that shape a person and makes them who they are at one specific point in their life. Indeed if you look at personality from a strict psychological and theoretical point of view, you realize that it is the evolution and the development of a person as a whole at a certain given point. Moreover, it is the shaped result of three main factors which are hereditary, environmental as well as situational. * Hereditary because our physical “structure” is determined by our genes and who our parents are. * Environmental because the culture in which we are brought up and the norms to which we are exposed to along our lives help shape our personality. * Situational because our personality, although stable for the most part, will change depending on what situation we are exposed to. Moreover, one should note that
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