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Individual Differences, Personality and Self

Aims of the chapterThis chapter will:

● Explore concepts and ideas thathave been used to build up theoriesabout individual differences,personality and self.

● Examine the limits of orthodoxy inmanagement and organization as webegin to understand ‘personality’ inthe terms of subjectivity and identity.

Key concepts and learning objectivesBy the end of this chapter you should understand:

● Personality type theories and how they differ from what are called trait theories of personality.

● The development of personality type theories from the ancient Greeks through Carl Jung to the more recentexperimental and laboratory-based work of the Eysencks. We will also look at the influential Myers-Briggs typeindicator of personality.

● The central ideas that inform what many people believe to be the biological basis of personality founded onresearch in neurophysiology and behavioural psychology. We will come to understand these ideas as essentialist inorientation – that is, they posit an inherent and universal core to explain who people are and what they do.

● The more idiographic approach associated with the writings of George Kelly, Carl Rogers and particularlyAbraham Maslow.

● The ideas associated with the phenomenological analysis of personality. This begins to take us out of the conceptualconfines of orthodox personality theory and opens up a more generous understanding of ‘self’. George HerbertMead (1863–1931) pioneered a phenomenological approach to personality, which allows us to see how a wider setof social forces shape the development and emergence of unique selves.

● The contribution of writers such Ronald Laing and Erich Fromm, who take the analysis even further to show howself is a dynamic and processual phenomena – one that develops and changes over time.

● A more existential interpretation of the individual in which it makes more critical sense to think about peoplethrough the concept of identity rather than personality.

Overview and key pointsWe tend to think of ourselves as a personality. Maybe we understandourselves, for example, as an extravert or an introvert, or perhaps we are‘easy going’, depressive or melancholic. We also attribute personality toour friends and colleagues. Personality is both complex and fascinating,but it is also elusive and difficult to define. Consider the amount of timewe all spend trying to work out the personality of people around us – whatmakes them distinctive, or what makes them ‘tick’ – and the difficultieswe have in understanding how and why different personalities clash orcohere within particular groups or social settings. A great deal of organ-izational behaviour (OB) can be explained through personality, and theastute manager is one who is both attentive to the different personalitiesof people at work, and subtle in their understanding of their dynamicsand implications.

This chapter takes you on a journey from popular, mainstream ways ofthinking about individual personality to more critical and theoretically

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innovative understandings of subjectivity and identity. The idea is to explore some of the mostimportant concepts and ideas that have been used to build theories about individual differences, per-sonality and self. We do not simply summarize the work of the major theories and ideas in conven-ient lists of revisable bullet points; instead we take you into the texts and thinking of some of the mostimportant writers and thinkers to illustrate how and why they thought as they did and how theyarrived at their conclusions. This will help us to start thinking for ourselves. In this way we will beginto see some of the implications of adopting the terminology of personality and of thinking of the man-agement of work organization in terms of the supervision of personality. In order to make this movewe must tackle some difficult issues surrounding the philosophy and methodology of the naturalsciences. This will allow us to consider the relevance and application of these methods to managementand OB. In other words, is management a science or an art? Once we have thought about these issueswe will be in a better position to appreciate OB as a something that is perhaps better understoodthrough the concepts of subjectivity and identity. Using these ideas helps us to open up and explorethe world of organization in a different way. It makes it possible to conceive of organizations as com-plex and disorderly phenomena divided by conflict and irreconcilable differences in values and goals.

Work organizations are obviously concerned with a series of rational and economic issues relating toproductivity and efficiency, but they are also characterized by a great deal of suffering, pain, and disap-pointment – much of which remains suppressed and unacknowledged. To begin thinking of the individ-ual in terms of ‘identity’ instead of personality helps to unearth these ‘deeper’ issues that lurk just belowthe surface of everyday life in work and employment. Explosive and unpredictable, these forces in anorganization can conspire to wreak havoc and disorganization. They demand thoughtful and maturemanagement in order to shape and channel their dangerous energies into forms that are less disruptiveto organization. This chapter will help to show that the way we choose to frame the problem of the indi-vidual will largely depend on our assumptions or understanding of the world and our role or possibilitieswithin it. This is a political question or problem and it remains hidden in most introductions to OB.

Chapter structureWe begin the chapter by exploring the different definitions and interpretations of personality. Thisillustrates the confusion and often contradictory understandings that most people hold about person-ality. Academic theories about personality have tried to clear up this confusion and have adoptedwhat are known as nomothetic or idiographic approaches. The thinking and methods of the naturalsciences have been used predominantly to develop nomothetic theories of personality. Modern sci-ence inherits the ancient classification of personality, which identifies four basic temperaments. Laterdevelopments organized these four temperaments in terms of two fundamental dimensions of per-sonality – namely changeability and emotion. The work of Carl Jung and his analytical psychologyhas also been tremendously influential for management research. Jung introduces ideas about ashadow world and the collective unconscious to explain how and why certain personalities develop,and it is largely because of Jung that we have become accustomed to thinking of people as eitherextravert or introvert. Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers Briggs took up the work of Jung in the devel-opment of a practical tool for managers interested in personality: the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator testof personality. According to Myers-Briggs there are four basic underlying tendencies or preferencesevident in the way we think and act and which define the type of personality we have.

Another major strand of modern research into personality looks at traits rather than personalitytypes. There are a whole series of ‘traits’ that make up individuals – things like anxiety, guilt, tension,low self-esteem, impulsiveness, consistency and predictability. The foundations of this approach tothinking about personality are associated with the studies of Hans and Michael Eysenck, who laid thegroundwork for how most people today think and study personality. The Eysencks used scientific lab-oratory tests to measure behavioural acts from which they inferred the existence of personality traits,traits which cohered or could be aggregated around two major categories (or forces) – extraversionand neuroticism. The relative influence of these two factors largely explains why people behave indifferent ways, and this is explained, in turn, by genetic inheritance.

The use of laboratories and the methods of natural science in the study of personality bring withit a whole series of assumptions and implications for management and OB. We introduce a criticalinterrogation of the scientific methodology to show that it is predisposed to seek explanations forpersonality in simple and reductive terms. Rather than challenge commonsense assumptions abouttraits such as ‘anxiety’, ‘irrational behaviour’, ‘emotional’ or ‘hopeful’, the Eysencks would take these

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