Organizational Behaviour
...to consider the individual as a part or a component. Essentially without life and character, and in order to be produced for the ‘mass.’ It has taken many decades for humanity to recover what it possessed in the eighteenth century but lost in the nineteenth - individuality. The twentieth century saw this renaissance initially expressed in shadows such as ‘percentiles’ in which we sought to capture first the physical ‘measure of man’ only to be followed by its cognate companion.
This research project is about differences among individuals. It focuses on key dimensions that distinguish people from one another. While learning and perception vary from person to person, even stronger differences exist in personalities and attitudes among people.
At first, we explore the nature of individual differences, then describe the role of personality in individual differences. Next we address the nature of attitudes and their effect on individuals, following up with a discussion of several important job-related attitudes. Finally, we relate attitudes to behavior and summarize several important managerial implications.
3. The nature of individual differences
Each person is much like everyone else in many important ways. Our biological systems are all quite similar, as is our basic appearance. Each person is also very different from everyone else.
The ways we think, the ways we interpret our environment, and the ways we respond to that environment are unique. We call this set of factors individual differences.
At the beginning of the 21st century, individual differences in performance are still not being included in workplace design. Most often they are ignored, minimized or not considered at all. Since the nature of individuality has so many aspects, not considering its complexity is a constant routine for many human factors practitioners and researchers. Still, we record...
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