Personality and Social Contexts Commons^™

Contemplating Mindfulness At Work: An Integrative Review, Darren J. Good, Christopher Lyddy, Theresa M. Glomb, Joyce E. Bono, Kirk W. Brown, Michelle K. Duffy, Ruth A. Baer, Judson A. Brewer, Sara W. Lazar

School of Business Faculty Publications

Mindfulness research activity is surging within organizational science. Emerging evidence across multiple fields suggests that mindfulness is fundamentally connected to many aspects of workplace functioning, but this knowledge base has not been systematically integrated to date. This review coalesces the burgeoning body of mindfulness scholarship into a framework to guide mainstream management research investigating a broad range of constructs. The framework identifies how mindfulness influences attention, with downstream effects on functional domains of cognition, emotion, behavior, and physiology. Ultimately, these domains impact key workplace outcomes, including performance, relationships, and well-being. Consideration of the evidence on mindfulness at work stimulates important …

Who Will Be The First To Buy Autonomous Vehicles? An Application Of Everett Rogers’ Diffusion Of Innovations Theory, Reilly Jackson Umberger

CMC Senior Theses

Autonomous, otherwise known as self-driving, vehicles represent the future of transportation. Vehicles that drive themselves offer far reaching benefits from increased leisure and productivity for individuals to significant improvements in congestion and infrastructure for governments. The autonomous car will radically change the way we look at transportation, and they are right around the corner. However, the question remains: are we ready? Are we, as a society, ready to hand over the steering the wheel and trust autonomous vehicles with our safety? This paper predicts how the autonomous car will spread through society by analyzing and applying the product qualities and …

Extroversion And Media Richness: An Analysis Of Media Preferences Of High Extroverts Within Sales Organizations, Donna M. Dudek

Communication & Leadership Dissertations and Theses

Personality traits and vocational acumen have been the source of research in recent years. Using personality measures such as the Five Factor model, researchers have sought to find common traits which may predict success in critical organizational roles. Communication needs and desires, including media richness choices, have also been the subject of past research. The purpose of this thesis is to tie these two themes together. Using a survey instrument containing both a personality inventory and a questionnaire examining media preferences in different scenarios, the author gathered data from sales professionals, client service professionals, and managers to evaluate similarities and …

A Method To My Quietness: A Grounded Theory Study Of Living And Leading With Introversion, Leatrice Oram

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Leadership scholar-practitioners must create a more sustainable, diverse, and equitable future, fostering emergence and development of resilient, competent leaders, including those who may have been previously overlooked.Leadership studies, particularly those situated in early trait and behavior paradigms, have long privileged extraverted leaders as ideal.The scholarly conversation is limited on introverted leaders; moreover, most of that literature depicts introversion as either a pathological construct associated with shyness and social anxiety, or includes introversion only by omission, as a state of deficit-of-extraversion.This study instead began with positive inquiry, framing introversion as a positive individual difference, and explored the lived experiences of introverted …

The "It" Factor, Ann Gallagher

Leadership Hour at Otterbein University

Gaining the Competitive Edge by Boosting Your Executive Presence

Have you ever known a leader or top executive who has got “it?” Well “it” is executive presence, and having “it” is the difference between moving up the ladder to leadership and being stuck on the middle rung. So have you got “it?”

Bright Or Dark, Or Virtues And Vices? A Reexamination Of The Big Five And Job Performance, Christopher M. Castille

Doctoral Dissertations

Personality research in industrial/organizational psychology has been dominated by the description of personality traits and outcomes as either bright or dark. Unfortunately, research has shown that bright traits have dark outcomes and vice versa, suggesting that a paradox is plaguing the literature. To resolve this paradox, I propose that a different heuristic stemming from positive psychology be utilized: virtues and vices. Virtues refer to exercises of human excellence while vices refer to actions of human failure. Drawing on the virtue ethics concept of the Aristotelian mean, dark traits are viewed as extreme or elevated levels of bright personality traits, allowing …

Cultural Context's Influence On The Relationships Between Leadership Personality And Subordinate Perceptions, Victoria J. Smoak

Doctoral Dissertations

Fascination with leadership and the pursuit of its understanding have been common across disciplines throughout history (Bass & Stogdill, 1990). Studying leadership in an organization provides value in understanding its relation to outcomes such as employee attitudes (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, & Bommer, 1996), individual performance (Tierney, Farmer, & Graen, 1999) and organizational performance (Day & Lord, 1988; Sully de Luque, Washburn, Waldman, & House, 2008). Leadership is suggested to be the underlying human factor key to organizational effectiveness (Hogan & Kaiser, 2005). In spite of the vast body of literature, much remains to be understood, especially understanding context (McCall & Hollenbeck, …

Methods Of Teaching Social Intelligence And Its Impact On Service Quality, Martee Fischman

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Current literature on social intelligence was reviewed and analyzed and most was focused on the general understanding of social intelligence and methods of measurement. There is little literature that connects social intelligence to the business world and none that focuses on the hospitality industry. It is important to fill the gap in research because social intelligence could have a significant impact on service quality, which in turn affects revenues. The current literature provides a good foundation, but more research is needed in the hospitality industry to determine the impact social intelligence actually has on service quality. Experimentation utilizing several measurement …

The Relationship Of Managers' Power Motivations To Personality Pathology, Jewel Darlene Adams

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Research has shown that managerial leaders have a higher motivational need for power than those in other positions. A leader's personality traits have been shown to affect organizational performance. Leaders who score high in dark traits (undesirable personality attributes shown to predict career derailment across organizations, levels, and positions) could also be more likely to use company resources for personal gain. There is a paucity of research examining the correlation between managerial dark traits and the need for power. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between managers' dark trait scores as measured by the Hogan Development …

Depth Of A Salesman: Exploring Personality As A Predictor Of Sales Performance In A Multi-Level Marketing Sample, Colleen Rose Miller

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Despite its growing prevalence in the realm of sales occupations, multi-level marketing (MLM) and its primary participants are not very well understood. In particular, there is a dearth of understanding in terms of the differentiating characteristics of individual sellers who are financially successful in comparison to those who perform poorly. This study sought to fill in some of these research gaps by exploring the antecedents of sales success by examining the validity of personality as a predictor of sales performance in the context of MLM. While significant relationships were indeed observed between certain facets of personality (specifically components of conscientiousness, …

Internal Attributes That Mitigate Perceived Job Insecurity: Improving Employee Satisfaction, Shelly Leigh Rogers-Sharer

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Employee satisfaction has been found to have a strong relationship with perceived job security. This study explored job insecurity in an unstable global economy. Specifically, it examined internal attributes of employees, hypothesizing that such attributes would enable employees to better cope with work-related stressors such as job insecurity. Specific attributes of personality and employability were assessed as potential moderators of job satisfaction and security, utilizing the theory of work adjustment and person-environment correspondence as theoretical frameworks. The specific attributes included facets of conscientiousness and neuroticism as well as dispositions of employability including openness to change at work, work and career …

Passion Isn't Always A Good Thing: Examining Entrepreneurs' Network Centrality And Financial Performance With A Dualistic Model Of Passion, Violet Ho, Jeffrey Pollack

Management Faculty Publications

We propose a conceptual model that links entrepreneurs' passion, network centrality, and financial performance, and test this model with small business managers in formal business networking groups. Drawing on the dualistic model of passion, we explore the relationships that harmonious and obsessive passion have with financial performance, mediated by network centrality. Results indicate that harmoniously passionate entrepreneurs had higher out‐degree centrality in their networking group (i.e., they were more inclined to seek out members to discuss work issues), which increased the income they received from peer referrals and, ultimately, business income. Obsessively passionate entrepreneurs had lower in‐degree centrality (i.e., they …

The Brief Aggression Questionnaire: Psychometric And Behavioral Evidence For An Efficient Measure Of Trait Aggression, Gregory D. Webster, C. Nathan Dewall, Richard S. Pond, Timothy Deckman, Peter K. Jonason, Bonnie M. Le, Austin Lee Nichols, Tatiana Orozco Schember, E. Layne Paddock

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

A key problem facing aggression research is how to measure individual differences in aggression accurately and efficiently without sacrificing reliability or validity. Researchers are increasingly demanding brief measures of aggression for use in applied settings, field studies, pretest screening, longitudinal, and daily diary studies. The authors selected the three highest loading items from each of the Aggression Questionnaire's (Buss & Perry, 1992) four subscales-Physical Aggression, Verbal Aggression, anger, and hostility-and developed an efficient 12-item measure of aggression-the Brief Aggression Questionnaire (BAQ). Across five studies (N = 3,996), the BAQ showed theoretically consistent patterns of convergent and discriminant validity with other …

Personality And Group Performance: The Importance Of Personality Composition And Work Tasks, Amit Kramer, Devasheesh P. Bhave, Tiffany D. Johnson

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine whether group members’ Big Five personality composition (variability, minimum, and maximum) affects the group’s performance. We employed an experimental design where participants were paid based on their performance in two different group-based experimental tasks: an additive task (where group performance is based on the sum of efforts of all group members) and a conjunctive task (where group performance is based on the performance of the weakest group member). Results indicate that variability in extraversion is positively related to group performance on the additive task but not on the conjunctive task. Conversely, neuroticism maximum score is negatively related to …

How We Complain: The Effect Of Personality On Consumer Complaint Channels, Riley Allen Berry

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of this study was to explore any connections that may exist between personality types and consumer complaint channels. A sample of 490 undergraduate students at the University of Nevada Las Vegas was surveyed during class time with a paper and pencil survey. The survey consisted of four service failure scenarios each with eleven possible courses of action. Respondents were asked to rate their likelihood to participate in each action on a seven point Likert-type scale. The three personality factors measured against the complaint behavior were Locus of Control, The California Psychological Inventory measure of Sociability, and Cattel's 16 …

The Beauty Industry's Influence On Women In Society, Ann Marie Britton

Honors Theses and Capstones

There has been a significant amount of research done on the effect that advertising in the fashion and beauty industry has on women. By creating advertisements with unrealistic images of beauty, it has resulted in anxiety, low self-esteem, and low self-confidence in many women. Most of these negative emotions stems from unhappiness among body and appearance. Less research has been performed relating to cosmetics and how this can have an influence on women, and how women can use cosmetics to manipulate their appearance. This paper first discusses the existing research that focuses on the cosmetic industry’s influence on women. From …

Designing An "Information-Experience" Using Creativity Science Theory And Tools, Stephanie Belhomme

Creativity and Change Leadership Graduate Student Master's Projects

An “information-experience” encapsulated by a technological/digital audio-visual tool presents data and potentially meaningful information to prompt actionable knowledge concerning: “unspoken creative process elements;” their profound impacts on both how well our “physiology of creativity” functions; but also on how well foundational creative thinking and behavioral prerequisites (energy, motivation, imagination, and ownership) are leveraged.

The product: 1) introduces the user to one component of the CPS (Creative Problem Solving) Facilitation Process - Exploring the Challenge; 2) features a content specific component which prompts exploration of the many correlations between societal, organizational / community, human physiological / behavioral data, and the direct …

An Investigation Into The Factors That Lead To Career Success In Accounting: Are Great Accountants Born Or Made?, Kelly Cocco

Honors Projects in Accounting

Are great accountants born or made? This paper examines various factors and personality traits which lead to career success in accounting, as perceived by accountants with various levels of earnings and job satisfaction. The current literature indicates that a gap exists between employer expectations of potential employees and the skills and traits that accounting graduates prioritize as most important when they are about to enter the workforce (Muda 2009). This study extends the literature by attempting to identify the traits and characteristics of successful accountants by surveying accounting professionals, who are defined as those who have careers in accounting functions …

An Examination Of Self-Directed Learning Readiness In Executive-Level Fire Officers, Steven G. Knight

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the self-directed learning readiness in executive fire officers in relation to the independent variables of personality type, educational attainment, and professional designation. This research utilized a quantitative design.

This study utilized the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the Self-Directed Learning Readiness Scale (SDLRS) with a sample of 250 professional firefighters. The total sample was divided equally between executive-level fire officers and firefighters at 125 each from professional departments in the Southeastern United States. Results were that the mean SDLRS score for the executive-level fire officers was 233.7 and significantly higher than the …

The Development And Validation Of A Conditional Reasoning Test Of Withdrawal, Levi Ryan Gust Nieminen

Wayne State University Dissertations

This study developed and evaluated a measure of implicit dispositional tendencies associated with lateness, absenteeism, and permanent withdrawal behaviors. The conditional reasoning framework developed by Lawrence James and colleagues was adopted. Novel cognitive biases or justification mechanisms associated with withdrawal were proposed, drawing on research and theory from the attribution (marginalization of withdrawal), commitment (revocable commitment), and fairness/equity (social injustice bias) domains. As part of the empirical validation design, college students enrolled in an Introductory Psychology course completed the conditional reasoning measure, and corresponding behavioral withdrawal criteria were collected unobtrusively throughout the 16-week course. Results of scale development analyses pointed …

Smiles As Signals Of Lower Status In Football Players And Fashion Models: Evidence That Smiles Are Associated With Lower Dominance And Lower Prestige, Timothy Ketelaar, Bryan L. Koenig, Daniel Gambacorta, Igor Dolgov, Daniel Hor, Jennifer Zarzoza, Cuauhtémoc Luna-Nevarez, Micki Klungle, Lee Wells

WCBT Faculty Publications

Across four studies, the current paper demonstrates that smiles are associated with lower social status. Moreover, the association between smiles and lower status appears in the psychology of observers and generalizes across two forms of status: prestige and dominance. In the first study, faces of fashion models representing less prestigious apparel brands were found to be more similar to a canonical smile display than the faces of models representing more prestigious apparel brands. In a second study, after being experimentally primed with either high or low prestige fashion narratives, participants in the low prestige condition were more likely to perceive …

Influence Of Age And Gender On The Emotional Intelligence Of Managers, L. K. Singh, Ruchi Srivastava

Business Review

Organizations are made up of people and function through people. Without people organizations cannot exist. The resources of men, money, materials and machines are collected, coordinated and utilized through people. Therefore, we can say that people are the most significant resource of any organization. However globalization has brought in more competition. Now the organizations are on a race to become the market leader and there is high competition for survival. All these factors have brought the employees under fear, sense of insecurity and high stress due to which they become nervous, chronically worried, depressed and emotionally instable. They are easily …

The Semiotics Of Sexual Identity: Myth Vs. History, Mackenzie Schroth

Honors Projects in English and Cultural Studies

In this project, I argue that gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) students majoring in liberal arts have a higher likelihood of being out and of feeling confident in their identity and manner of self-expression. On the other hand, GLB students majoring in business-related fields are more likely to either be closeted or to fit a very defined, stereotyped gay identity. I test my hypothesis by conducting a semiotic analysis of sexual identity and by looking to the history of sexual identity categories. I also survey and interview various students, both liberal arts and business majors, to determine their perceptions about …

The Relationship Between Top Leaders' Observed Narcissistic Behaviors And Workplace Bullying, Deborah A. Regnaud

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Workplace bullying is a global problem that leaves workers emotionally harmed and organizations financially strapped; yet in many cases, business leaders fail to adequately address the problem. The purpose of this research was to determine if the top leader had a direct impact on the presence of bullying within the workplace. Based on personality trait theory as a theoretical foundation, the key issue this study explored was the relationship between the presence of workplace bullying and observed narcissistic behaviors exhibited by the top leader. Participants consisted of 84 human resources professionals reporting directly to the CEO/president of companies located in …

A Theory Of Mental Credit, Jason Soll

CMC Senior Theses

Many philosophical subjects attempt to analyze the basis of human welfare. Theories of desert, distribution of property, and happiness tend to dominate philosophical discourse. Mental credit, which is the mental acquisition of credit for one’s accomplishments and the satisfaction one derives from this credit, is absent from this discourse despite its underlying role in the way people think about their lives. Mental credit is an eternal cognitive good that deserves thoughtful attention and pious decisions for implementation. The following theory of mental credit seeks to serve as a unifying theory for the mental calculations that guide life’s most imperative decisions, …

The Essential Structure Of Compulsive Buying: A Phenomenological Inquiry, Letty Workman

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

While many jokes and sales of specialty merchandise have been made that make light of consumers who frequently shop and buy (e.g., "When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping," or "I am a shopaholic"), for 18 million Americans suffering from compulsive buying, the process of shopping and buying has caused their lives to literally go out of control. The outcomes of this disease for individuals, families, and business are all negative. In a marketing era of social responsibility, if marketers either knowingly or unknowingly encourage increased consumption among compulsive buyers, potential negative outcomes stand to impact others well …

The Effect Of An Overall Rating Item On Halo Error In Performance Evaluations, S. Elizabeth Hogue

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study focuses on how the presence or absence of an overall rating item on a performance evaluation form affects levels of halo error and satisfaction with the form. Participants included undergraduate college students who were randomly assigned to groups receiving a form with or without an overall rating item at the beginning of the form. A satisfaction item was included on both forms. The analyses included a z-test for correlations from independent samples to determine the difference between the two evaluation forms and a t-test to determine the difference between the satisfaction scores of the two forms. The analyses …

Economic Outlook 2010: Innovation, Connie I. Reimers-Hild

Kimmel Education and Research Center: Presentations and White Papers

This article discusses the importance of innovation to individuals and the overall economy.

Expanding Leader Capability: An Exploratory Study Of The Effect Of Daily Practices For Leader Development, Simon Rakoff

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Leadership is, at its essence, an influence relationship between people. Leaders are often thought of as those who are able to influence people to take actions oriented toward achieving specific goals and objectives. While many books have been written, and myriad scholarly research studies conducted enumerating countless personal characteristics, qualities, and skills of the exemplary leader, little has been done to understand and convey the ways in which an individual might go about cultivating these virtues; which are often said to include charisma, empathy, communication skills, and others. Through a multiple single-subject design, this research examines the individual-level effect of …

The Use Of Personality Test Norms In Work Settings: Effects Of Sample Size And Relevance, Robert P. Tett, Jenna R. (Fitzke) Pieper, Patrick L. Wadlington, Scott A. Davies, Michael G. Anderson, Jeff Foster

Department of Management: Faculty Publications

The value of personality test norms for use in work settings depends on norm sample size (N) and relevance, yet research on these criteria is scant and corresponding standards are vague. Using basic statistical principles and Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) data from 5 sales and 4 trucking samples (N range = 394–6,200), we show that (a) N >100 has little practical impact on the reliability of norm-based standard scores (max=±10 percentile points in 99% of samples) and (b) personality profiles vary more from using different norm samples, between as well as within job families. Averaging across scales, T-scores based on …