1. What are personality traits? Define and discuss the Big Five personality trai
ID: 403886 • Letter: 1
Question
1. What are personality traits? Define and discuss the Big Five personality traits. Define and discuss other personality traits that affect managerial behavior.
2. Explain Rikeach's kinds (categories) of personal value. Discuss five of the values from each of the categories.
3. Discuss the differences between attitudes, moods, and emotions.
4. What is organizational culture?
5. Discuss the role of values and norms in organizational culture. How would organization members go about changing the culture of an organization?
Explanation / Answer
BEHAVIOR AND ARTIFACTS
We can also characterize culture as consisting of three levels (Schein 1988). The most visible level is behavior and artifacts. This is the observable level of culture, and consists of behavior patterns and outward manifestations of culture: perquisites provided to executives, dress codes, level of technology utilized (and where it is utilized), and the physical layout of work spaces. All may be visible indicators of culture, but difficult to interpret. Artifacts and behavior also may tell us what a group is doing, but not why. One cartoon which captures this aspect shows two executives sitting at their desks in an office. Both have large billed black and white checked hats. One is saying to the other, "I don't know how it started, either. All I know is that it's part of our corporate culture."
VALUES
At the next level of culture are values. Values underlie and to a large extent determine behavior, but they are not directly observable, as behaviors are. There may be a difference between stated and operating values. People will attribute their behavior to stated values.
ASSUMPTIONS AND BELIEFS
To really understand culture, we have to get to the deepest level, the level of assumptions and beliefs. Schein contends that underlying assumptions grow out of values, until they become taken for granted and drop out of awareness. As the definition above states, and as the cartoon illustrates, people may be unaware of or unable to articulate the beliefs and assumptions forming their deepest level of culture.
To understand culture, we must understand all three levels, a difficult task. One additional aspect complicates the study of culture: the group or cultural unit which "owns" the culture. An organization may have many different cultures or subcultures, or even no discernible dominant culture at the organizational level. Recognizing the cultural unit is essential to identifying and understanding the culture.
Organizational cultures are created, maintained, or transformed by people. An organization's culture is, in part, also created and maintained by the organization's leadership. Leaders at the executive level are the principle source for the generation and re-infusion of an organization's ideology, articulation of core values and specification of norms. Organizational values express preferences for certain behaviors or certain outcomes. Organizational norms express behaviors accepted by others. They are culturally acceptable ways of pursuing goals. Leaders also establish the parameters for formal lines of communication and message content-the formal interaction rules for the organization. Values and norms, once transmitted through the organization, establish the permanence of the organization's culture.
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