PERSONALITY TRAIT- CONVERGING EVIDENCE OF COGNITION AND JOB EXPECTATION AMONG MANAGEMENT STUDENTS

Kundhavai Santharam
Department of Business Administration, Thiagarajar School of Management, India
DOI: 10.21917/ijms.2015.0018

Abstract :
Habitual patterns of behaviour, emotion and thought hold a higher stake than other factors in shaping individuals to transform as per the expectations of corporate world. A psychophysical system of a student is strongly based on the background of school and college education, especially when the choice of management education is made by them there seems to be a great impact of personality traits over the employment that they seek. Hence, this paper used management students from a reputed B-school in Ahmedabad city of Gujarat to investigate the relationship between personality traits and expectations about workplace factors. Since previous research studies highlight proven insights on personality trait perspective, this study has kept the same perspective as basis and endeavored in examining the relationship between big five personality factors and the behavioural pattern of the management students. Additionally, the traits of the management students they endear to switch to occupation is analysed and putforth for discussion and presented in the result. Remarkably, the choice of their employment is primarily based on the personality traits that they would like to transform in the corporate arena. The study as a whole attempts to assess the students’ personality constructs that facilitate the psychological type’s theory and the different orientations such that self, social and workplace are gauged.

“Personality is a dynamic organisation, inside the person, of psychophysical systems that create a person‟s characteristic patterns of behaviour, thoughts, and feelings.” - Carver and Scheier

In terms of individual differences, whether a personality trait influences the behaviour of management students or not is a timeless question. To address this question, the researcher has identified those traits common among the management students keeping the personality perspectives as the basis. Reviews in this paper include the likely behavioral paradigms demonstrated by students during the initial period of the course. Generally, personality theory becomes the central point of education and in particular of educational psychology, on which the educational content, teaching methods and counseling are based – the educational psychologists and theorists therefore always contribute their best to form it. The personality theories by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Eric Fromn, Alfred Adler, Abraham Maslow, Kurt Lewin, Burrhus Frederic Skinner, Gordan Allport, Carl Rogers, etc,. are useful and very well-known, but very limited; they cannot say the true nature of man and life, because they regard them as having a fixed nature while in fact they are impermanent and selfless. In Buddhism, over fifteen centuries ago, and more than that, there were at least three personality theories formed, and all of them were mental analyses which divide a person‟s mind into healthy or good mental factors. All these exist due to the varied personality type which may be categorized from viewpoint of various perspectives.

Perspectives that relate to personality include the trait, biological, psychoanalytic, learning, phenomenological and cognitive. The underlying assumption of the learning perspective especially is that all behaviour is learned through experiences and by interaction with the environment. The learning perspective views a person as entering the world as a tabula rasa (blank slate), although it acknowledges that there are instincts and pre-set responses to stimuli, as well as a preference for pleasure and a desire to avoid pain [8]. Primarily, however, the learning perspective differ from one perspective to another that proposes if a person is born with an innate nature or personality structure - some biological theories call it temperament, trait theories call it dispositions, psychoanalysts call it drives or instincts and the humanists also use the term drives. The presence of genotypical influences on personality supports the attempt to understand socialization in terms of interaction of constitutional characteristics with social practices [5]. Eysenck is one among other personality theorists who attempted in dealing with socialization. William Sheldon‟s classification of personality according to body type and called it to be a person‟s somatotype. In addition, Sheldon identified three main somatotypes as shown in Fig.1.

Fig.1. William Sheldon‟s personality classification Source: Retrieved from http://wilderdom.com

Similarly, a psychology of personality deals with all the individual aspects of a given human organism except for certain expressly excluded ones. In addition, attitudes are present dispositions which have developed through a long and complete process like all behaviour, they are motivated and they are adjustments to present situations [14]. Gardener noted that a reliably measured complex like „aggressiveness‟ often proves to be derived from such constitutional factors namely age, health, strength and from factors of competition and social imitation. There are research work that illustrates that traits cannot be perfectly heritable or stable in a perfect manner [27]. Assessments of other persons are made not only in the light of salient behaviour, but in the light of all sorts of little things which one marginally impresses us. As we respond to the major features of behaviour, we respond also to facial expression, gesture, posture, breathing, blanching or flushing of skin.

Pulin and Garg (1976) have highlighted in their book on Indian youth about assert, support and task orientedness of which 10% of the youth were positive when the individual displayed tolerance for others and their opinions. The individual accepts weaknesses of others and does not consider them as an object of ridicule. During the period of study it has also been noted that when the youth was largely anchored in the family he/she operated with four roles of identities namely the good boy/girl; the exceptional or distinguished boy/girl; emotionally fragile oriented boy/girl; and boy/girl who got recognition, praise and support. It was also noted that primitive societies differ in their conception of the main nature and purpose of life. It was also noted that primitive societies differed in their conception of the main nature and purpose of life. The social generation of scientific knowledge is also needed to be included while understudying personality traits as indicated by K. Danziger, (1990) but the context in terms of scientific knowledge is not given due weightage in this study as compared with other perspectives. Apart from the above as per W. Revelle, (1989), purpose, design and hypothesis perspectives of the study has given due importance by the researcher.

The main objectives of the study manifests from three main perspective namely - self, social and corporate. Hence they include:

• To identify the self-orientation component among students which strives to be an important factor among management students when they are in the corporate arena?
• To assess the students‟ personality constructs that facilitates the psychological types theory
• To correlate the relation between the personality traits and the quality of efforts put in for academic, social and personal activities
• To predict the presence or absence of management skills and assess their prevalence and check if they are influential or not.
• To examine mediating effects of personality over the students‟ performance in learning
• To investigate possible demographic variables and measure the prevalent level of risk taking propensity, goal orientation and openness to experience.

This study specifically targeted the first year students of Post graduate programme in management in a top B-school in Ahmedabad city in Gujarat. The independent variable (IV) taken was the gender on one hand and various personality factors were taken as the dependent variable (DV) on the other hand for the analysis.

The survey was conducted in a top B-school in Ahmedabad city known to be the elite institution that has proven evidences in pursuing its mission of professionalizing Indian management through innovative teaching, research, institution building and consulting. One stage of survey was conducted inside the classroom with selected students and later on they were given an option to take up the survey by circulating the questionnaire through email.

Participants were 73 (of which 17 were females), between 21 and 28 years of age, from the first year of post graduate programme in management class. The socio-demographic characteristics are shown below in Table.1.

Table.1. Socio-demographic characteristics of participants

Questionnaire format was utilized for data collection. Participants were asked questions based on skill and ability in four different domains (Academic, Social, Corporate and General). Socio-demographic characteristics namely gender, age, educational qualification, experience and parents occupation was also included. In Journal of personality, Robert R. McCrae and Paul T. Costa (1989) pointed out that Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) purports to measure the trait and type of personality and explains individuals themselves and professionals too. Hence, based on the literary search MBTI was used for this study.

The Big Five factors of personality (namely openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism) which tend to be highly significant in this study are put forth:

Openness – The individual characteristics relates to fantasy, aesthetics, action, values and ideas.

Conscientiousness – The individual characteristics relates to competence, order, dutiful, achievement oriented and modesty.

Extraversion – The individual characteristics relates to warmthness, gregariousness, excitement and activeness.

Agreeableness – The individual characteristics relates to trust, straight forwardness, positive emotions.

Neuroticism – The individual characteristics relates to anxiety, hostility, depression, self-consciousness and impulsiveness.

While analyzing the degree of above factors‟ responses reflected that Agreeableness factor had the highest percentage score with 42, Conscientiousness factor with 37, Openness factor with 36, Extraversion factor with 31 and Introversion factor with 29 respectively.

Myers-Briggs 16F:

Warmthness – Desire to develop close relationship with others in the working environment by the teachers is included as an aspect in the questionnaire of this study.

Reasoning – Extent to which one can solve numerical and verbal problems is included by way of questioning them about the subject know-how.

Emotional Stability – How calm a person responds to the demand of life is included by inquiring the respondents about a particular situation in the working environment.

Dominance – Tendency for the want of controlling others is asked through the question pertaining to decision over controlling the colleagues in a working environment.

Liveliness – How spontaneously somebody expresses themselves is known through the answer of the respondents to the question relating to openness to express.

Rule consciousness – How much value is placed by the respondents on externally imposed rules are also included as an aspect in questionnaire of this study.

Social Boldness – The respondents‟ level feeling at ease in social situation is tested in this questionnaire.

Sensitivity – The extent to which emotions and sentiments influence the outlook and judgement of the respondents are analyzed through appropriate questions.

Vigilance – The cautious behaviour towards motives of others is included for the respondents.

Abstractness – The respondents‟ attention towards concreteness or abstractness about a particular matter is taken for consideration in this study.

Privateness – How far the respondents like to keep the information to their self is tested in this study.

Apprehension – The extent to which the respondents are prone to self-criticism is included.

Openness to Change – The mental state of the respondent to accept and positive reaction to change is tested.

Self -Reliance – How far the respondents enjoy their own company and trust their own judgement is verified as another factor among all sixteen factors.

Perfectionism – The need to rely on structure rather than leaving things to chance is an important factor hence it is included.

Tension – How far the respondents react easily to the situations that cause frustration is analyzed among the respondents.

Selection – The extent to which the respondents enjoy building relationship with people is also included as the last factor for testing the personality and behavior.

Previous work on personality traits had proved that traits have influence of concealing academic achievement wherein evaluations of factors affecting loneliness or hopelessness among university students have been done. It was also found that the attachment styles, social anxiety and moderating roles among students in seeking social support were also the main contributing factors of the study. G. Matthews, D.M. Jones and A.G. Chamberlain (1989), have cited works based on detecting cues in the environmental perspective and recognizing the relevance to one‟s intention. Similarly, this study has taken such contributing factors into account.

In this study the researcher noted converging evidence that homesickness factor and academic performance is not related with one another. The Table.2 indicates the results arrived by chi-square test, wherein the value arrived is less than the table value.

In general those individuals who are activity oriented tend to exert themselves either in academics or in all the activity done by them. The rationale for the hypothesis extroversion and self exertion characteristics is presented in Table.3. It is noted that there is no significant relationship between the extroversion and self-exertion factor among the participants.

Table.2. Moral support characteristics and academic performance relation of respondents

Table.3. Extroversion characteristics and self exertion relationship of respondents

organize the collected attributes, Factorial Analysis technique with nine variables according to the degree of individual‟s behavioral pattern in the study was used. It was possible to extract four common factors among the students namely accepting new ideas, activeness, social interaction, self initiation which ultimately had correlation with the extraversion trait of personality in a social environment. The factorial analysis made is plotted in Table.4.

Analysis in terms of personality trait - Introversion was also made using the factorial analysis and there were two factors namely compressed behaviour and resource utilization was noted to be common among the students.

The Table.5 is instrumental to prove the relationship found in the classroom and in social environment. It is also noted that the self exertion had a vast variance when compared to the correlated ones. The study by R. Vallerand et al (2007), highlights of varied personalities and their behavior in performance, career, societal concerns. Hence few concerns were taken into account and factored for the study.

Table.4. Factorial analysis of personality traits among the respondents in social environment

Table.5. Factorial analysis of personality traits among the respondents in classroom and social environment

Karau and Williams' (1993) Collective Effort Model (CEM) clearly illustrates that individuals tend to engage in social loafing when engaged in combined performance. This factor was taken into consideration and put forth for analysis and the results reported that there was nominal percentage (27%) among the student to engage in social loafing.

The inclination towards the mathematical or theory paper was also analyzed and it was noticed that 62% of the students were interested in mathematical papers than theory papers which ultimately reflect that the student group is more interested in solving problems and arrive at absolute results – a trait of extrovert as per the citation of R.L. Hoffman (1967) while discussing the results pertaining to extrovertedness and group problem solving.

In this day of globalization, the necessity for a manager or an entrepreneur or an innovator to develop management skills has become inevitable. It is needless to say that a good business skill guides one towards the right goal, hence the management skills to be found among the students was an aspect to be covered for this study. The report reflected that 41% of the respondents have skills of management.

Table.6. Level of existence of management skills among respondents

A question on passion in life included in the instrument revealed the orientation of participants wherein, 48% of the respondents had written a generalized statement, 5 and 14% of the study group had shown interest towards corporate and entrepreneurial path of life. Other responses included 8% of them who were service oriented; 5% had the target of self excellence in whatever job they opt in future and 18% of the group were unclear about their passion in life which was reflected with their no-response to the question about passion in life. The personality constructs are of great importance as it helps to analyze on the fact if entrepreneurs are born or not as per the study of Sexton, Michael (2007). The Table.7 illustrates the above explained context. Rorer, LG. (1990).

Table.7. Life - orientation perspectives of respondents

The life orientation is kept as a basis in this study as excerpts from the study based on psychoanalytic approaches to personality by D. Weston (1990). Henceforth, those aspects pertaining to general, corporate and other orientations were taken and analyzed as shown above.

It is evident from the analysis resulted that by and large the management students have the trait of extroversion. Personality [6] defines as a consistent behaviour patterns and interpersonal processes originality within the individual. But the individual behaviour tends to change based on the occurrences of happenings in the environment. Since most of the time the person‟s notions of consistent pattern, individual characteristics and behavior are said to be vague as highlighted in R.R. McCrae, (1994) study.

As a consequence of use of psychological characteristics and person‟s knowledge a common behavioral pattern among the group can be done but the significance depends upon various other aspects too. The traits of the management students found to be commonly correlated to extrovertedness though in few cases the measure of correlation varied. This study had its own limitation of not including aspects of behaviour of students like convenient learning pattern followed by students; general habits in terms of eating or sleeping and other day to day activities; handwriting analysis; their body postures and way of walking and seating in class. From the point of view of participation the whole of the population did not take part since the students were given an option either to take or not to take the survey. In addition, students tend to have greater impact from the peer pressure [35], hence it would be a helpful initiative in view of participation per se. Each role we play is a part of interaction and for every interaction it demands a role that should already exist [46]. Therefore for that role to exist it highly depend upon the personality.

The results may help the institute to identify the personality traits while deciding the aspects relating to students from seating arrangement, designing pedagogy, special attention to service oriented students and others. The students may be involved more in group activities or management games so that it would contribute towards managing a difficult cultured or diversified corporate world. The designing of pedagogy may be decided by analyzing the level of those who are kinesthetic and those who are non-kinesthetic. Finally, since most of the known and famous persons are from this elite institution those students who are service oriented or education oriented or individual/corporate oriented then the students may be groomed according to that stream. As a result it may help the students‟ personal development and to handle other aspects related to art of management efficiently. Life‟s values and beliefs which are evident for any individual‟s personality development may be a made a part of the curriculum so that the students proactively view the same from different perspectives and develop themselves.

Previous reviews highlight that traits in general are not directly observable but inferred – without such an inference from conduct of studies it could not be possible to explain. Any specific action is a product of innumerable determinants, not only of traits but of momentary pressures and specialized influences. Moreover, L.A. Pervin, (Ed.) (1990) has indicated that an individual is a multi-dimensional being and one factor alone cannot be taken to arrive at complex behaviours. Hence, there are certain cases where the researcher has taken specific factors for this study.

But it is the repeated occurrences of actions having the same significance following upon a definable range of stimuli having the same personal significance that makes necessary the postulation of traits as state of being. In this study the Vernon‟s theory of personality may be noted and found that individuals who are extroverted possess the traits namely dominant, unemotional and good character. Traits are not all times active, but they are persistent even when latent, and are distinguished low threshold of stimulation. The analysis and thorough interpretation by the researcher enables to draw a conclusion that personality being the most important aspect in each and everyone‟s life plays an important role in influencing their behaviour either in the working environment or any other environment. It has been used to understand what motivates an individual, what careers one might best be suited for and how learning and teaching might be affected. Though many researchers have conducted studies on personality it is noticeable point that personality is never a standard one and it varies from one individual to another and from one circumstances to another.

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