Question

Overview of individual differences in organisational behaviour

Answer 1

The impact of individual differences on organisational behaviour is becoming more and more tremendous. Especially in organisation’s recruitment and selection process, individual differences are highly concerned by employers. Considering the development of organisational effectiveness, researchers spent more time on the study of individual differences to discover how they may affect individual performance so to influence organisation’s performance. Robbins (2003, p.103) states that organisations want to match individual to specific jobs by taking individual differences into account and organisations have expanded their interest to the individual-organisation fit recently. How to effectively manage people within a diverse context is becoming a serious issue for all managers. According to Mullins (2007, p.122), people differ from each other and individual differences are the basis of diversity. Thus, an effective manager in modern business world is required to be able to identify individual differences and coordinate individual with organisation’s requirement. This essay will illustrate a brief study about individual differences and discuss three main factors that have a significant influence on individual differences: Demographic factors, intelligence and ability, and personality.

Individual differences are becoming more and more important to organisations. According to Mullins (2007, p.123), in order to generate good performance of an organisation, managers should be able to understand the individuals within the organisation and the way how individual are related and interact. Moreover, individuality is considered as a key to organisational effectiveness especially in recruiting and selecting process. Ashleigh and Mansi (2012, p.68) state that individual differences are particularly crucial for work psychologist in selection, recruitment, development, and training of individual. How do individuals differ is a very complex topic for researchers to study. In general, researchers and work psychologists differentiate individual based on several factors such as: ethnic origin, gender, culture background, attitudes, personality traits, intelligence, abilities, perception, motivation, and etc. (Mullins, 2007, p.124). In other words, as psychological perspective, individual behaviour differences can be explained by variety of theories such as cognitive intelligence. The study of individual differences is also known as differential psychology (Ashleigh and Mansi, 2012, p.68) which evaluates individual differences in intelligence, ability, values, emotional adjustment, creativity, and personality. In reality, individual differences can be seen from people’s appearance, the way people think, the way people behave, the way people react against stimulations, and etc. Ashleigh and Mansi (2012, p.68) state that individual differences can shape people’s career path and affect other people’s perception about you. The study of individual differences has been done by researchers for many years. According to Ashleigh and Mansi (2012, p.69), individual differences were learned by human behaviour at the first. After World War II, researchers started to focus on individual personality aspect which led to traits theories. There are two main approaches can be concluded as the way for researchers to study individual differences which are nomothetic and ideographic approaches. As a matter of fact, most of the organisational behaviour researchers prefer to use nomothetic approach and focus on traits to assess individual differences. So far, the widely adapted measures of individual differences were basically developed upon traits. Therefore, it is glad to see that the development of such theories has enabled researchers and work psychologists to predict future performance of individual in order to improve organisational effectiveness.

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