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In the last blog we learnt about self-efficacy and its implications for a manager. In today’s blog we will look at the concept of self-esteem and its implication for a manager.

Self-esteem is a pretty common term that we use in our daily lives! In management, it refers to the individual’s general feeling of self worth. It is normal for every person to have strengths as well as weakness – when ones belief that their strengths are more important than their weakness, we say the individual has a high self-esteem. On the contrary, a person with a low self-confidence views themselves negatively. People with low self esteem are seen to be strongly affected by what other people think about them – they complement people who give a favorable feedback while cut down people giving unfavorable feedback.

It is not to say that evaluation of other people doesn’t have an effect at all – If the evaluation is to say the individual is liked for what one is – it is seem to have a more stable effect on individual’s self-esteem; while being liked for ones achievement has a temporary effect on one’s self-esteem.

Self-esteem also has an effect on a host of other aspects including the attitude one has towards things. It has been seen that people with high self-esteem perform better and are more satisfied with their jobs. A team with high self-esteem people is more likely to be successful.

Extremely high self-esteem is not a good thing – it could lead to overconfidence and relation conflicts. Such individuals would also shift their social identities to protect themselves when they do not live up to the standard.

Success tends to raise self-esteem while failure tends to lower it. Given that this is generally a positive characteristics, managers should encourage employees to raise their self-esteem by giving them appropriate challenge and opportunities for success.

In the last blog, we looked at the implication of Locus of Control, in today’s blog we look at Self Efficacy and look at how a manager could make use of this understanding.

Self-efficacy could be seen to be of two types based on the scope of activities – General and Task. General Self-Efficacy refers to the general belief of an individual about one’s ability to meet the job demands in a wide variety of situations. An Employee with a high general self-efficacy would be more confident in their job-related ability and would show a larger positive energy, influence others etc – this in turn affects them perform better at their activity. Individuals with low self-efficacy feel ineffective at their work place and express doubts about their ability to perform a new task well.

An adage that “success attracts success” is in some ways associated with these characteristics of a team to certain extent. When one succeeds in a task, the self-belief increases and this is transferred to the next task they do and so on – there by making it a chain. It is also interesting to note that people with high self-efficacy would like to provide their opinions in the task they do at work. The opportunity to participate is extremely important for the people with high self-efficacy.

A Manager would need to carefully observe the behavior of the employees working with him and create opportunities for people to increase their self-efficacy.

Task specific Self-Efficacy is a similar belief but limits itself to a specific task.

In the last blog, we looked at three different theories that would explain an individual personality. In order to understand the particular behavior of an individual, one would need to look at the personality characteristics. Research has indicated 5 major characteristics are important for managers to understand the job related characteristics. These are – Locus of Control, self-efficacy, self-esteem self-monitoring and positive/negative effect. In today’s blog, we look at understanding locus of control.

An Individual’s generalized belief about internal control (self-control) versus external control (control by the situation or others) is referred to as Locus of Control. It has been observed and strongly indicated even in research studies that people with a strong internal locus of control are found to have higher job-satisfaction and performance. They are also likely to assume managerial positions and prefer a participative management styles.

When promoted, people with both internal and external locus of control will have similar reactions to being promoted; they would have similar reactions – a high job satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational commitment. Though the initial reactions are similar, these would continue for a long time with those possessing an internal locus of control, while those with external locus of control would begin attribute to the external environment.

With this understanding, managers would look at adopting an appropriate style of involvement of these sorts of employees. People with internal locus of control will be like to enjoy freedom in their job, while those with an external locus of control will appreciate a more structured work environment.

In the last blog we looked at the Trait theory approach to understand the personality, in today’s blog we briefly attempt to understand the psychodynamic, humanistic and integrative theories to understand the concept of personality.

The Psychodynamic Theory is based on the works of Sigmund Freud. The subject of emphasis in this theory is the influence of unconscious determinants of behavior. The theory focuses on the ongoing conflict between the “id” and the “superego”. The “ego” attempts to manage this conflict which leads to compromise and thereby results in a defensive behavior – for example the denial of reality!

The Humanistic Theory proposed by Carl Rogers emphasizes the individual growth and improvement. It emphasizes the fact that, there exists a basic drive towards self-actualization which essentially signifies the individual quest to be all one can be. This approach contends that self-concept is the most important of an individual’s personality.

The Integrative Approach looks at personality as having a composition of various individual psychological processes. The theory introduces the concept of “Disposition” – which means the tendencies of individuals to respond to situations in consistent ways.  These are influences both by genetics and experience. Examples of dispositions include emotions, cognition, attitudes, expectancies and fantasies.

In the last blog we understood what personality meant, in this blog we look at the “trait theory” of personality.

The trait theory – uses the traits as a base to understand the individual personality – Traits are the broad, general guides that lend consistency to behavior. There have been number of traits identified, but the some recent progress has identified that many of these traits can be reduced to a set of five traits. These five traits are called – “The Big Five” Personality Traits. These “Big Five” Traits are:

This trait theory is not without criticism – the major of these criticisms is that, just the identification of traits by itself wouldn’t be of any use. It would be important to understand that personality is dynamic and not completely stable. The influence of situation too is something that cannot be ignored.

In the last blog we looked at the relation between the individual and his environment and how the behavior could be understood as part of this interaction. In this blog we begin our journey towards understanding the concept of “personality”

Personality could be understood as a relatively stable set of characteristics that influence an individual’s behavior. It is the individual difference that provides consistency to an individual’s behavior. The origin of Personality of an individual has been a much debated issue by a lot of intellects – some have attributed it to hereditary, others talk about an early childhood experience etc. 

Personality has also been understood to include attitudes, modes of thought, feelings, impulses, strivings, actions, responses to opportunity and stress and everyday modes of interacting with others – it is the repetitive nature of these that makes it part of the character of the individual and hence a part of his/her personality.

To understand better about Personality, numerous theories have been proposed by researchers. For the sake of discussion, over the next few blogs we would look at these 4 traits:

In the last blog, we began looking at individual differences as the basis of manager’s ability to manage. In today’s blog we continue understanding the Lewin’s Theory of individual differences.

Lewin expressed the idea of individual differences in an equation as follows:

B = f (P, E)

Where,

B = behavior

P = person

E = environment

This equation in some form is the essence of “interactional psychology” – this approach emphasizes that in order to understand human behavior, we must know something about the person and the situation. The 4 basic propositions of this approach are listed below:

To understand this better, over the next few blogs, we look at the various personality differences one by one.

In the last blog we looked at the challenges that managers face when managing a global organization. All the challenges of the managing the organization, is to understand the source of these challenges. We begin by exploring the concept of individual differences.

From common observation, we realize that all individuals are different from each other – the source of uniqueness could be from the individual’s skills, abilities, personalities, attitudes, values and ethics. The way the individuals differ is called individual differences. It is these differences that are the essence of the challenge of management – fundamentally, no two individuals are alike!

Managers always face the challenge of working with a multitude of individual characteristics, so it is quintessential for the manager to understand individual differences. – This would enable them to work better with others.

The diagram is an adaption from the Fig 3.1 (
variables that affect human behavior ) in the standard reference book on Organizational Behavior we detailed out at the begining of this series.

The variables that affect human behavior could be summarized in the above diagram. We would continue this discussion in the next blog.

In the last blog we looked at the mindset that would be necessary for one to be a practitioner in OB. In today’s blog we begin having a look at some of the challenges a manager would have to face in a globalized work setting.

Let’s begin with understanding the difference between “international” and “globalized” organization. International organization meant that a business would conduct its business across the national borders – a strict sense of organization’s nationality could be sensed in the usage of the word. In contrast, a globalized organization implies that the organization is free of national boundaries and it operates in a borderless world.

When organization move beyond their national boundaries some of the host of issues that hit hard for a manager in such a setting could be listed below

Over the next few blogs we look at some of these challenges that the managers would have to face in a globalized setting.