personality and employee job performance.docVIP

Personality and Employee Job Performance Introduction Individual personality traits and characteristics are considered to be important factors affecting the organizational performance indirectly through its effects on employee performance. Mkoji and Sikalieh (2012) argue that organizations, in current global and competitive business environment, that capitalize on diversity are the ones who have advantage over the others as workforce diversity represents individuality that includes personality, gender, race, region, and other various components. Subsequently, organizational performance is achieved when the goals are realised through the integration of various factors mentioned hitherto. The present paper is aimed at understanding the importance of personality in relation to employee job performance which in turn is linked to overall organizational performance. Though the focus is to analyse the personality traits, analytical understanding of various personality measuring tools is also carried out. Discussion Organizations should know about personality because they are composed of people who need to be organized and managed to optimize desired organizational outcomes. While behaviourists assume that people can adapt to any environment and circumstances, which are determined by financial, logistic and communication requirements; personality psychologists believe that human flexibility is limited in terms of certain operational arrangements and structure (Schneider and Smith, 2004). In order to better understand the link between personality and employee job performance which has overall effect on the organizational performance, it is necessary to understand the term personality and especially in relation to the organizational context. According to MacKinnon (cited in Schneider and Smith, 2004), personality is a factor, which on one hand is concerned with the perspective of the observer; and on the other hand, how an individual perceives himself i.e. self-identi