Unit 2: Personality, Emotions and Motivation

Individual behaviour in organisations is driven by three interacting internal systems: the stable dispositions of personality, the transient states of emotion, and the energising force of motivation. This unit treats each as a predictor of workplace conduct.

• Personality: the relatively enduring set of characteristics and behavioural tendencies that make a person distinct and reasonably consistent across situations.
• Emotion: intense, short-lived feeling states directed at a specific object, distinct from longer-lasting, diffuse moods.
• Motivation: the processes that account for the intensity, direction and persistence of effort toward a goal.
• Governing link: disposition (personality) shapes how events are appraised (emotion) and how effort is sustained (motivation), which together produce observable job behaviour and performance.

II. Personality — Structure and Measurement

A. Orientation

Personality is studied both as inherited temperament and as learned pattern, commonly summarised by the Big Five (OCEAN) trait cluster: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism.

• Determinants: heredity (genes, brain chemistry), environment (culture, family, socialisation), and situation (context that activates or suppresses traits).
• Key OB traits: locus of control, self-esteem, self-monitoring, Machiavellianism, Type A/B, proactive personality.

B. Theories of Personality

Personality is explained by four broad theoretical families.

• Trait theory: identifies stable dimensions; Cattell's 16 PF reduces surface traits to 16 source factors, later condensed into the Big Five. Conscientiousness is the strongest single predictor of job performance across roles.
• Psychoanalytic theory (Freud): behaviour springs from unconscious conflict among three structures.
  • Id: pleasure-seeking, instinctual drives.
  • Ego: reality-testing mediator.
  • Superego: internalised moral standards; anxiety is managed by defence mechanisms.
• Humanistic theory (Maslow, Rogers): personality unfolds toward growth and self-actualisation; the "self-concept" and unconditional positive regard drive development.
• Social-learning theory (Bandura): personality forms through observation, imitation and reciprocal determinism — person, behaviour and environment mutually influence one another; anchored by self-efficacy beliefs.

C. Its Assessment

Assessment matches method to purpose: selection, counselling or development.

• Self-report inventories: structured questionnaires such as the MBTI (16 types on four dichotomies: E/I, S/N, T/F, J/P) and Big Five scales; economical but open to faking.
• Projective techniques: ambiguous stimuli reveal hidden motives — the Rorschach inkblot test and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), where subjects invent stories about pictures.
• Behavioural / observational measures: assessment centres, situational tests and 360-degree feedback observe traits in action.
• Limitation: self-reports risk social-desirability bias; projective tests have low reliability, so multiple methods are combined.

III. Transactional Analysis and Attribution Theory of Perception

A. Orientation

Both frameworks explain interpersonal understanding: one dissects the units of social exchange, the other explains how we assign causes to behaviour.

B. Transactional Analysis

Developed by Eric Berne (1960s), TA analyses the basic unit of social interaction — the transaction — to improve communication.

• Ego states: every person operates from three states.
  • Parent: taught attitudes, judgemental or nurturing ("you should").
  • Adult: rational, fact-processing, here-and-now.
  • Child: felt reactions, spontaneous or rebellious.
• Transaction types:
  • Complementary: stimulus and response come from expected ego states (Adult–Adult), so communication flows.
  • Crossed: response comes from an unexpected state, breaking communication.
  • Ulterior: a hidden message runs beneath the surface message.
• Life positions: enduring self–other attitudes, e.g. "I'm OK — You're OK" (healthy) versus "I'm not OK — You're OK".
• Strokes: units of recognition (positive or negative) that reinforce behaviour; managers use positive strokes to motivate.

C. Attribution Theory of Perception

Proposed by Fritz Heider and extended by Harold Kelley, it explains how observers infer whether behaviour is internally or externally caused.

• Attribution dimensions (Kelley's cube): judgement rests on three cues.
  • Distinctiveness: does the person act this way only in this situation?
  • Consensus: do others behave the same way?
  • Consistency: does the person act this way repeatedly?
• Rule: high distinctiveness and consensus with low consistency point to external attribution; the reverse points to internal (dispositional) attribution.
• Errors:
  1. Fundamental attribution error: overrating internal causes for others' behaviour (blaming a late employee's laziness, not traffic).
  2. Self-serving bias: crediting success to oneself and failure to external factors.

IV. Emotions — Emotional Intelligence and Affective Events

A. Orientation

Emotions influence decision-making, negotiation and leadership; two frameworks explain the skill of managing them and the way workplace events generate them.

B. Emotional Intelligence

Popularised by Daniel Goleman (1995), EI is the ability to perceive, understand, regulate and use emotions in oneself and others.

• Goleman's five components:
  • Self-awareness: recognising one's own emotions as they occur.
  • Self-regulation: controlling impulses and moods.
  • Motivation: drive to achieve beyond money or status.
  • Empathy: sensing others' feelings.
  • Social skills: managing relationships and building networks.
• Emotional labour: job-required display of expected emotions; surface acting (faking display) causes more strain than deep acting (genuinely modifying feeling).
• Significance and limits: EI predicts leadership effectiveness and teamwork, but measurement is debated and it overlaps with existing personality traits.

C. Affective Events Theory of Emotion

Proposed by Weiss and Cropanzano (1996), AET holds that workplace events trigger emotional reactions that then drive attitudes and behaviour.

• Causal chain:

Work environment → Work events (hassles/uplifts) → Emotional reactions
      → Affect-driven behaviour  and  Job attitudes → Judgement-driven behaviour

• Work events: daily hassles (a rude client) and uplifts (praise) are the immediate emotional triggers, not the job itself.
• Personality and mood: dispositional affect moderates how strongly an event is felt; the same event angers one worker and barely touches another.
• Two behaviour paths:
  1. Affect-driven: immediate, emotion-led acts such as snapping at a colleague.
  2. Judgement-driven: considered acts flowing from accumulated attitudes, such as resigning.
• Implication: emotions accumulate over time, so managers should manage the flow of daily events, not just overall satisfaction.

V. Motivation — Early and Contemporary Theories

A. Orientation

Motivation theories divide into content theories (what energises) and process theories (how motivation operates); the early theories are largely content-based, contemporary ones add process and cognition.

B. Early Theories of Motivation

These 1950s–60s theories are widely known but empirically weak, yet form the vocabulary of the field.

• Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: five ascending levels — physiological, safety, social, esteem, self-actualisation; a satisfied need no longer motivates.
• Herzberg's Two-Factor Theory: distinguishes two independent sets.
  1. Hygiene factors: pay, policy, conditions — their absence dissatisfies but their presence does not motivate.
  2. Motivators: achievement, recognition, growth — these create real satisfaction.
• McGregor's Theory X and Y: Theory X assumes workers dislike work and need control; Theory Y assumes they seek responsibility and self-direction.
• McClelland's Needs Theory: three learned needs — need for Achievement (nAch), Power (nPow) and Affiliation (nAff); high achievers prefer moderate-risk goals with clear feedback.

C. Contemporary Theories of Motivation

These enjoy stronger empirical support and dominate current practice.

• Goal-Setting Theory (Locke): specific and difficult goals, with feedback, raise performance more than vague "do your best" goals; effective goals are SMART.
• Self-Efficacy (Bandura): belief in one's capability to perform; raised through mastery experience, vicarious modelling, verbal persuasion and arousal.
• Equity Theory (Adams): workers compare their outcome/input ratio with a referent; perceived inequity motivates correction.

Compare:  (Outcomes / Inputs) self   vs   (Outcomes / Inputs) other
Equity → satisfaction; Inequity → tension → behaviour to restore balance

• Expectancy Theory (Vroom): motivation is the product of three perceptions.

Motivational Force = Expectancy × Instrumentality × Valence

• Expectancy: effort will lead to performance.
• Instrumentality: performance will lead to reward.
• Valence: the value placed on that reward. A zero on any term yields zero motivation.
  • Self-Determination / Cognitive Evaluation: intrinsic motivation grows when autonomy, competence and relatedness are met; extrinsic rewards can crowd out intrinsic interest.
  • Worked example (Expectancy): if a salesperson rates expectancy 0.9, instrumentality 0.7 and valence 0.8, force = 0.9 × 0.7 × 0.8 = 0.504; halving instrumentality to 0.35 cuts force to 0.252, showing that a distrusted reward link, not effort, is the bottleneck.
  • Integration: contemporary theories combine — clear goals raise expectancy, equitable rewards raise instrumentality, and valued, need-satisfying outcomes raise valence.