L02 Overview

The Individual at the Workplace

As we begin to explore the variety of issues common to content covered in the School of Labor and Employment Relations’ curricula, we need to initially focus on the nature of employees. In that context, we often assert – even celebrate – the differences among employees. In this lesson we will learn that diversity extends beyond definitions of protected groups in U.S. labor law. Personality traits are one of the important elements that illustrate variety among workers. The lesson will introduce you to the “Big Five” personality traits as one source of variation. The lesson also makes reference to the Myers-Briggs testing tool.

In addition, the lesson introduces a classic in American literature, a short story by Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener.” The story represents in an extreme form of the concept of a “difficult person” at work.

Objectives

At the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

• Identify “protected groups” under current U.S. employment law;
• Describe at least five ways in which individual employees can be different beyond membership in a protected group; and,
• Analyze how those differences can affect individual and organizational performance.

Readings & Resources

• Read the online lesson
• Tyson, S (2015). Individual Differences. Essentials of Human Resource Management. New York. Routledge. pp. 2-14 available on the Library Resources tab
• Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener. A Story of Wall-StreetDownload Bartleby the Scrivener. A Story of Wall-Street. 

Assignments

• Participate in the L02 Discussion on the Workplace
• Submit the L02 Quiz on The Individual at the Workplace

See the Calendar or Syllabus to ensure that you are fully aware of assignment due dates for this lesson.

 

L02 Diversity at Work

The term “employee” is a large tent concept. There is no one typical employee. Our own experiences suggest that employees differ in a wide variety of ways.

First, some of the differences are reflected in the law. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (EEOC, n.d.) identified certain groups that would be protected from discrimination based on:

• race
• color
• ethnic origins
• religion
• sex

Subsequent federal and state legislation protected others (e.g., age, disability and sexual orientation). These categories raise a variety of legal and ethical problems beyond the issues of personality discussed below. (A subsequent lesson will explore this dimension of diversity.)

In addition, organizations hire individuals, each of whom will be a unique contributor to the organization’s purpose. How will a person’s unique personalities, desires, values, background and/or motivations affect that individual’s ability and willingness to serve the organization?

Also, it isn’t enough to understand how any employee will contribute to the organization’s needs. How will the organization serve the unique desires and/or motivations of the individual? In this regard we have already discussed the way in which employment can serve the types of needs Maslow addresses (see Lesson 01).

 

L02 “Big Five” and “Myers-Briggs”

With respect to this lesson, the first course reserve reading is from a standard organizational behavior text. One of the very important concerns in understanding the nature of the workforce is personality. What personality characteristics positively (or negatively) influence performance? Those who study the subject focus on what has been dubbed the “Big Five” personality factors. These traits include,

• Emotional Stability – anxious to calm
• Extraversion – outgoing to reserved
• Openness to New Experiences – preference for exploring to preference for routine
• Agreeableness – trusting to suspicious
• Conscientiousness – organized to disorganized

The following short video presents a fair summary of each trait. As you will see, it isn’t necessarily bad, for example, to be an introvert!

 

 

The reading from the Griffin, et. al. (2020) text also describes the Myers-Briggs testing process, a tool that many employers use to help match personality types to specific jobs. If you have never participated in such an activity, you can take the free assessmentinks to an external site. on the 16 Personalities website.

 

L02 The Significance of Personality: Proceed with Caution

Although there is evidence that personality matters, the authors of the text assigned to this lesson make clear that we need to be careful to always credit the results of personality testing devices. As they point out,

Even assessment using the most rigorous and valid measures is likely to be somewhat imprecise. There are also times when using more specific personality traits to predict outcomes such as turnover or performance are more useful than the more general Big Five traits because the more specific trait more directly influences the intended outcome. (Griffin, 2020, p. 91)

We also need to be careful in making choices merely on a single characteristic. For example, there is a general belief that extraverted persons will perform better in sales and marketing positions compared with introverts (Griffin, 2020, p. 90). To make a hiring decision solely on that personality trait doesn’t take into account the fact that an introverted person’s actual behavior at work might be more predictive of job success than his or her underlying personality traits.

In a Ted Talk that has been viewed more the 25,000,000 times, Susan Cain discusses her own personal journey as an introvert.

 

 

If Ms. Cain had never identified herself as an introvert, would you have come to that conclusion solely based on the manner in which she performed during this presentation?

L02 Generational Differences

Many universities circulate to their faculty at the beginning of each new academic year a short memo reminding them of how different they are from most of their students. The issue is most obvious in the traditional residential environment where freshmen are generally 18 years old. An example from 1980 might read:

• Incoming freshmen were not alive when the Soviet Union launched the first person into space.
• They do not remember the assassination of J.F. Kennedy.
• They in all likelihood had never watched Rin Tin Tin or the Lone Ranger on television.

The memo was a reminder that faculty had very different life experiences compared to students, causing faculty to be mindful, among other things, of not assuming that everyone in class would understand the world in which they grew up.

In the past several decades, the issue of discrete generations populating the workplace has become an area which scholars and practitioners have studied. The primary concern are the differences between generations that affect individual and organizational performance. As one writer indicates,

Generations refer to cohorts of people based on shared experiences at similar ages. The assumption is that shared experiences at similar ages create similarities among people in terms of personal attributes, attitudes, personalities, political orientations and other dispositions, such as work-related attitudes and behaviors (Heathfield, 2019)

At the same time there are commentators who caution us against placing too much emphasis on attributing problems at work to differences in the generations, a controversy we won’t attempt to resolve in this course. What we can assert with confidence is that learning to communicate with groups who grew up with a different set of life experiences can be very challenging.

 

L02 The Difficult Employee

Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby the Scrivener” describes a collection of employees with very unique personalities. Bartleby is of particular interest. His frequent response, “I prefer not to,” suggests a person who is hardly open to experience. As you read the story, you might also ask yourself the following questions:

• Did the organization err in hiring one or more of the characters?
• Suppose these same individuals presently work in your own organization (or one for which you previously worked): How should the organization address behaviors the characters exhibit in the story?
• Is Bartleby a “difficult person?” If so, why? If not, why not?

These are questions we will address in other lessons; however, they are also questions about which anyone of us might have an opinion based on our own work experiences. In fact, our assessment for this lesson will ask each of you to share your own personal experience with a fellow employee whom you believe to be “difficult.” If you can make a connection to any issue raised in Melville’s short story, please do.

 

L02 Conclusions

It is common for HRER professionals to argue that an organization’s greatest assets are its employees. Whether that is true or not doesn’t diminish the critical role human beings play in organizational success. Whether the CEO, managers, supervisors or any other line employees working to create successful outcomes, understanding the variety of backgrounds, personalities, skills and life histories each person brings to the effort is critical to creating productive relationships.

We will see this addressed in other lessons. As examples, personality becomes an important factor for many companies in deciding whom it should hire. How we communicate with colleagues when conducting training programs or performance appraisal interviews will depend in part on a person’s background, life experiences and personality, and companies will frequently rely on personality testing to help make expatriate assignments.

 

L02 References

EEOC (n.d.). Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/statutes/titlevii.cfminks to an external site.

Griffin, Rickey W. et. al. (2020). Organizational Behavior: Managing People and Organizations. Cengage.

Heathfield, Susan (2019). “Why Generational Differences are a Workplace Myth.” https://www.thebalancecareers.com/do-not-focus-on-workplace-generational-differences-415327

Melville, Herman. Bartleby the Scrivener.