Individual Behavior in Organizations - Essay Example

Individual Behavior in Organizations What makes a leader? Are leaders born or made? Research and substantiate your answers. There are many theories trying to identify what exactly makes a leader. Each of them has underlying assumption leading to the idea that being a leader could either be innate or influenced by some environmental factors. Leadership in most of the time employs the concept of personality. Personality is a very important component prior to understanding organizational behavior.

In other words, one would be able to understand clearly what makes a leader by understanding personality. How it is gained or become part of an individual is a very important point in understanding human behavior. In psychology, there are various approaches in understanding personality. These include trait approach, learning approach, biological and evolutionary approach and humanistic approach. Based on these approaches, leaders could be either born or made. From the trait approach, psychologists believe each person possesses certain trait to a given degree (Feldman 335).

This means everyone has certain form of personality, but there is only variation of certain degree an individual possesses it. According to the learning approach, personality could be learned responses to the external environment (Feldman 338). In other words, personality could be learned. On the other hand, the biological and evolutionary approach is under the assumption that important components of personality are inherited, showing the importance of genetic factors in personality (Feldman 340).

Under the humanistic approach, people are at the basic level good and continue to develop to higher level of functioning (Feldman 343). Each of these theories has strong remarkable point, but also some weak points that could be addressed by other theories. This explains the level of complexity found in understanding personality. Thus, in this manner, it has also been complex to understand whether leaders are born or made. Zaleznik believes organizations can develop leaders (81). For him, peer relationship exists and has important impacts on employee’s personality development.

At Apple Inc., Steve Jobs created a culture of developing personality of its employees. There is a strong point of personality development as Jobs wanted to develop human resource that would be leading the innovation. As a result, Apple created a strong innovative culture. This clearly shows that personality could be influenced by the environment and those who already have strong degree of some certain personality tend to be developed or underdeveloped depending on the environmental influence.

This could therefore imply organizations could actually develop leaders, as personality could be learned or enhanced. There is a higher possibility that leaders could therefore be made. List and explain the Big Five personality dimensions. Describe the relationship between the Big Five and job performance. The Big Five personality dimensions include extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness. Individuals who have high level extraversion express themselves better.

Those who excel in agreeableness have sufficient pro-social behaviors such as trust, altruism and so on. Individuals with high degree of conscientiousness are most likely to be organized and critical of small details. Those who experience high degree in neuroticism are individuals who most likely to become emotionally unstable. Then those who have high degree of openness are individuals who have broad range of interest. All of these are important traits Kreitner and Kinicki mentioned in their book “Organizational Behavior.

” They emphasized these personalities have essential impact on the human resource’s job performance. For instance, they explicated those individuals with high conscientiousness perform better at the workplace than those who remarkably with low degree of it. They cited from research “those individuals who exhibit traits associated with a strong sense of purpose, obligation, and persistence generally perform better than those who do not” (132). Most studies concerning personality and job performance try to determine their degree of association or relationship.

As a result, firms look forward to valuable personality. In the case of successful entrepreneurs, what they are looking for a valuable human capital is a proactive personality (32). No one could therefore contest; personalities covered by Big Five personality dimensions are highly associated with job performance. . SourcesFeldman, Robert S. Essentials of Understanding Psychology. 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003. Print.Kreitner, Robert, and Angelo Kinicki. Organizational Behavior. 9th ed.

New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009. Print. Zaleznik, Abraham. Harvard Business Review on Leadership: Managers and Leaders: Are they different? Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998. Print.