The Individual Performance Equation is one that enables us to consider the major factors affecting performance. It asserts that Performance = Individual Attributes ´ Work Effort ´ Organisational Support.

Individual attributes consist of demographic, competency and personality characteristics, values and attitudes and perceptions, . Work effort is reflected in the motivation to work. Organisational support consists of a wide range of organisational support mechanisms such as tools, resources, instructions, and the like. These provide the opportunity for an individual to perform, given their willingness.

Demographic differences among individuals are background variables that help shape what a person has become. (This is relevant to assignment). Some are current (e.g. socio-economic status) and some are historical (e.g. where a person lived growing up). Gender, age, disability and ethnic background of people at work are particularly subject to stereotyping. However, they are important individual attributes to address in managing successfully an increasingly diverse workforce. Instead of resorting to stereotypes on such matters as male/female differences, it is more meaningful, when possible, to examine individual job competencies, that is to focus on the qualities of the individual. It is useful to be informed about gender and other differences, and to use that to support your assessments, but it is potentially dangerous to depend solely on them.

Individual job competencies consist of aptitude (the capability to learn something) and ability (the existing capacity to do something). Aptitudes are potential abilities. Both physical and cognitive competencies are used in employee selection and training and, of course, the assessments should be valid and job related. Emotional intelligence is a more recently acknowledged concept that also enables us to better understand individual behaviour and to achieve better behaviour within organisations. Emotional intelligence is a form of social intelligence that allows us to monitor and shape our emotions and those of others.

Personality captures the overall profile or combination of characteristics that represent the unique nature of a person as that person reacts and interacts with others. The nature/nurture controversy is the argument over whether personality is determined by heredity or genetic endowment, or rather by one's environment (a developmental approach). There is general agreement that the two work in combination (see figure 3.3). Personality is thus not rigidly fixed and can change over time. Argyris believes that people pass through several stages on a journey from immaturity to maturity (figure 3.4) while Levinson sees an individual’s personality in relation to key life stages and transitions (figure 3.5).

We expect there to be a predictable interplay between an individual’s personality and his or her tendency to behave in certain ways. Five key dimensions of personality are:

· Extroversion/introversion — the degree to which individuals are oriented to the social world of people, relationships or events as opposed to the inner world

· Conscientiousness — the extent to which individuals are organised, dependable and details focused, as opposed to disorganised, less reliable and lacking in perseverance

· Agreeableness — the extent to which individuals are compliant, friendly, reliable and helpful

· Emotional stability — the degree to which individuals are secure, resilient and calm

· Openness to experience — the extent to which individuals are curious, open, adaptable and interested in a wide range of things, versus resistant to change and new experiences.

Another way of classifying personality is to look at problem-solving styles. This affects the way people collect information and make decisions. Four types are:

· Sensation-types who prefer routine and order, and emphasise well-defined details in gathering information

· Intuitive-types who prefer the big picture, like solving new problems, dislike routine and prefer to look for possibilities than work with facts

· Feeling-types who are oriented towards conformity and try to accommodate themselves to other people

· Thinking-types who use reason and intellect to deal with problems.

Other dimensions of personality are:

· Locus of control — the internal/external orientation or the degree to which people feel able to affect their lives

· Authoritarianism/Dogmatism — the rigidity of people’s beliefs, with dogmatists additionally regarding legitimate authority as absolute

· Machiavellianism — the degree to which people view and manipulate others for purely personal gains

· Self-concept — the concept people have of themselves as physical, social and spiritual or moral beings. Self-esteem is one aspect of self-concept that indicates a person’s belief about their own worth based on an overall self-evaluation.

There are three key strategy areas for capitalising on workforce diversity and dealing with individual attributes. These are (1) recruitment and employment conditions; (2) education, training and development, and follow-up; and (3) rewards and promotions. The fit between job requirements and the previously mentioned individual characteristics categories assumes increasing importance in light of an increasingly diverse work force. Education and a wide range of training in particular become more and more important. In applying the various diversity strategies, managers should keep the individual performance equation in mind as well as values, attitudes and perceptions.

Values are global beliefs that guide actions and judgements across a variety of situations. They are broad preferences about appropriate courses of action or outcomes such as right or wrong, good or bad. They are especially important in OB because they can directly influence outcomes, such as performance or human resource maintenance, and also have an indirect influence on behaviour through attitudes and perceptions. They can be treated at the individual level and as a part of organisational and societal cultures. Values arise from personal thought and choice, but they are strongly derived from parents, friends and other social or external reference groups. Value congruence is an important concept that explains when individuals express positive feelings on encountering others who exhibit values similar to their own.

Attitudes are similar to values and are influenced by them but have a more specific focus. They are predispositions to respond positively or negatively to someone or something in one’s environment. They operate through intended behaviour to influence actual behaviour or other outcomes. Attitudes have three components —cognitive (beliefs, opinions, knowledge), affective (feelings) and behavioural (intentions to behave in a particular way though this may not necessarily eventuate). The affective component is the most essential and most accurately depicts the attitude. Cognitive dissonance describes a state of perceived inconsistency between a person's expressed attitudes and actual behaviour.

There are a number of attitudes that have particular relevance in the workplace. The most important of these is job satisfaction, a specific attitude that indicates the degree to which individuals feel positively or negatively about their jobs. It is an emotional response to one’s tasks as well as the physical and social conditions of the workplace. Often, job satisfaction is measured in terms of feelings about various job facets, including the work itself, pay, promotion, co-workers and supervision.

Job satisfaction is related to employee turnover and absenteeism, but the relationship to performance is controversial. Three arguments are that:

· Satisfaction causes performance

· Performance causes satisfaction

· Rewards cause both satisfaction and performance. (very relevant to assignment)

Managing values and attitudes involves using various measures of values to determine the consistency between individual values and those of the organisation, department and employees’ superiors. In the face of an increasingly diverse work force, such measures can serve as a baseline for diversity workshops and related approaches. Attitudinal measures can be treated similarly. Finally, a sensitivity to the importance of understanding values and attitudes in interpreting OB work situations should be developed.

Individuals use the perceptual process to receive, organise, interpret and retrieve information from their environment. Schemas play a role in all these stages, and causal attributions are particularly important in the interpretation stage. People use the perceptual process to deal with information for decision and action responses. Perceptions are influenced by a variety of factors, including social and physical aspects (of the situation, object or person being perceived) as well as such personal factors as needs, experience, values, attitudes and personality (of the perceiver). Perceptual distortions can affect perceptual responses. These include:

· Stereotyping — assigning an individual to a group or category and the groups commonly associated with that category

· Halo effect — when one attribute of a person or situation is used to develop an overall impression of the person or situation

· Projection — the assignment of personal attributes to other individuals

· Selective perception — the tendency to single out for attention those aspects of a situation or person that reinforce existing beliefs, values and needs. (highly relevant to assignment)

Causal attribution is an attempt to explain why something happened the way it did.

Attribution theory is one theory that allows us to examine how people perceive and attribute the causes of events, responsibility for the outcomes of the events, and the personal qualities of those being perceived. Using attribution theory involves explaining the distinctiveness, consistency and consensus in and between people’s behaviour in situations. It can lead to:

· Fundamental attribution error in which a person underestimates the influence of situational factors and overestimates the influence of personal factors in evaluating someone else’s behaviour.

· Self-serving bias — the tendency to deny personal responsibility for performance problems but to accept personal responsibility for performance success. (relevant to assignment)

Influencing the perceptual process first involves recognising that perceptual differences exist in any situation along with an awareness of common perceptual distortions. Secondly, it involves an understanding of schemas and their role in the perceptual process as well as an understanding of attribution theory and the importance of impression management and how to create and maintain desired impressions of oneself in the eyes of others. Finally, it involves an understanding of the actions necessary to facilitate the perceptual process.