When he first departs, he is woefully unprepared for the hardships of the journey. But at the same time, over the course of the story, he exhibits hidden resources of bravery he might not have...
Tim O’Brien is both the narrator and protagonist of The Things They Carried. The work recounts his personal experience in the Vietnam War and allows him to comment on the war. He enters the war a scared young man afraid of the shame that dodging the war would bring him and leaves the war a guilt-ridden middle-aged man who tells stories about Vietnam in order to cope with his …
Dec 17, 2020 · These two traits inform most of his actions over the course of the poem. He is courageous in that he is willing to face monsters that give even other warriors pause. He thinks nothing of fighting...
Mar 15, 2018 · They impact his personality by making him more introspective, as he decides to put pen to paper and write about his friends, their story, and all that he has learned over the course of the book....
Dutiful: Beowulf takes responsibility for civilization beyond his own family and homeland, traveling across the sea to aid Hrothgar in defeating Grendel. He is selflessly willing to risk himself for others. Strength: Beowulf has immense physical strength. This bodily trait is essential to his ability to defeat Grendel.
His most immediately recognizable characteristics are his prodigious strength and endurance, which more often than not fall directly into the category of the superhuman. Indeed, he is able to defeat the vile Grendel single-handedly and go on to defeat Grendel's mother immediately afterward.
What are the major characteristics of Beowulf? Beowulf’s personal characteristics include the heroic traits of loyalty, honor, bravery, faith, and superhuman strength. He demonstrates his sense of honor and his loyalty to Hrothgar by volunteering to kill Grendel and then Grendel’s mother.
Beowulf's loyalty often drives his courage: he does what he does to rescue the Danes from destruction.
Loving and loyal to family: Beowulf was raised by his grandfather from age seven. He loves and remains loyal to his grandfather, Hrethel, as well as to his uncle, Hygelac. Compassionate towards others: Beowulf offers sympathy and words of comfort to Hrothgar when his son dies, and he worries about Freawaru's marriage.
He was Phi Beta Kappa in college and had a full scholarship to graduate school at Harvard when he got drafted. He went to the war because he was embarrassed not to. Most of the men in his platoon—Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Kiowa, Azar—have been in Vietnam for a lot longer than he has, and he doesn't want to seem weak in front of them.
There are three important Tim O'Briens in the story: Tim the Soldier, Tim the Writer, and Timmy the Kid. They're all the same person, but it's important for you to keep the three separate, so we'll do the same. Let's start with Tim the Soldier.
Finally, there's Timmy the Kid. Timmy the Kid is nine years old when the love of his life, a girl named Linda, dies of cancer. Timmy's mostly important because in him, we can see the beginnings of Tim the Writer.
There are 120 questions and it should take you about 15–20 minutes to complete. You will receive feedback about your personality after you have finished the test.
Because we are profoundly influenced by the situations that we are exposed to, our behavior does change from situation to situation, making personality less stable than we might expect. And yet personality does matter—we can, in many cases, use personality measures to predict behavior across situations.
Exercises and Critical Thinking 1 Consider your own personality and those of people you know. What traits do you enjoy in other people, and what traits do you dislike? 2 Consider some of the people who have had an important influence on you. What were the personality characteristics of these people that made them so influential?
Personality traits such as introversion, friendliness, conscientiousness, honesty, and helpfulness are important because they help explain consistencies in behavior. The most popular way of measuring traits is by administering personality tests on which people self-report about their own characteristics.
Self-esteem (Rosenberg, 1965) High self-esteem means having a positive attitude toward oneself and one’s capabilities. High self-esteem is associated with a variety of positive psychological and health outcomes. Sensation seeking (Zuckerman, 2007) The motivation to engage in extreme and risky behaviors.
One of the most important measures of personality (which is used primarily to assess deviations from a “normal” or “average” personality) is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a test used around the world to identify personality and psychological disorders (Tellegen et al., 2003). The MMPI was developed by creating a list of more than 1,000 true-false questions and choosing those that best differentiated patients with different psychological disorders from other people. The current version (the MMPI-2) has more than 500 questions, and the items can be combined into a large number of different subscales. Some of the most important of these are shown in Table 11.3 “Some of the Major Subscales of the MMPI”, but there are also scales that represent family problems, work attitudes, and many other dimensions. The MMPI also has questions that are designed to detect the tendency of the respondents to lie, fake, or simply not answer the questions.
Personality is an individual’s consistent patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving. Personality is driven in large part by underlying individual motivations, where motivation refers to a need or desire that directs behavior. Early theories assumed that personality was expressed in people’s physical appearance.
Two strong predictors of our happiness at work and commitment to the company are our relationships with coworkers and managers. The people we interact with, how friendly they are, whether we are socially accepted in our work group, whether we are treated with respect by them are important to our happiness at work. Research also shows that our relationship with our manager, how considerate the manager is, and whether we build a trust-based relationship with our manager are critically important to our job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Bauer, T. N., Bodner, T., Erdogan, B., Truxillo, D. M., & Tucker, J. S. (2007). Newcomer adjustment during organizational socialization: A meta-analytic review of antecedents, outcomes, and methods. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92, 707–721; Gerstner, C. R., & Day, D. V. (1997). Meta-analytic review of leader-member exchange theory: Correlates and construct issues. Journal of Applied Psychology, 82(6), 827–844; Judge, T. A., Piccolo, R. F., & Ilies, R. (2004). The forgotten ones? The validity of consideration and initiating structure in leadership research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89, 36–51; Kinicki, A. J., McKee-Ryan, F. M., Schriesheim, C. A., & Carson, K. P. (2002). Assessing the construct validity of the job descriptive index: A review and meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87, 14–32; Mathieu, J. E., & Zajac, D. M. (1990). A review and meta-analysis of the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of organizational commitment. Psychological Bulletin, 108, 171–194; Meyer, J. P., Stanley, D. J., Herscivitch, L., & Topolnytsky, L. (2002). Affective, continuance, and normative commitment to the organization: A meta-analysis of antecedents, correlates, and consequences. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 61, 20–52; Rhoades, L., & Eisenberger, R. (2002). Perceived organizational support: A review of the literature. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87, 698–714. When our manager and overall management listen to us, care about us, and value our opinions, we tend to feel good at work. When establishing effective relations with employees, little signals that you care about your employees go a long way. For example, in 2004 San Francisco’s Hotel Carlton was taken over and renovated by a new management group, Joie de Vivre Hospitality. One of the small things the new management did that created dramatic results was that, in response to an employee attitude survey, they replaced the old vacuum cleaners housekeepers were using and started replacing them every year. It did not cost the company much to replace old machinery, but this simple act of listening to employee problems and taking action went a long way to make employees feel better. Dvorak, P. (2007, December 17). Theory and practice: Hotelier finds happiness keeps staff checked in; focus on morale boosts Joie de Vivre’s grades from workers, guests. Wall Street Journal, B3.
Personality traits and values are two dimensions on which people differ. Personality is the unique , relatively stable pattern of feelings, thoughts, and behavior that each individual displays. Big Five personality dimensions (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and Neuroticism) are important traits; others that are particularly relevant for work behavior include self-efficacy, self-esteem, social monitoring, and proactive personality. While personality is a stronger influence over job attitudes, its relation to job performance is weaker. Some companies use personality testing to screen out candidates. Companies using personality tests are advised to validate their tests and use them to supplement other techniques with greater validity, such as tests of cognitive ability. Companies must also ensure that a test does not discriminate against any protected group. Values express a person’s life goals; they are similar to personality traits in that they are relatively stable over time. In the workplace, a person is more likely to accept a job that provides opportunities for value attainment. People are also more likely to remain in a job and career that satisfy their values.
In fact, in the English language, more than 15,000 words describing personality have been identified. When researchers analyzed the traits describing personality characteristics, they realized that many different words were actually pointing to a single dimension of personality.
Person-organization fit. The degree to which a person’s values, personality, goals, and other characteristics match those of the organization. refers to the degree to which a person’s personality, values, goals, and other characteristics match those of the organization. Person-job fit.
Employee preferences for job design and enrichment (aspects of organizing) may be a function of individuals’ personalities and values. Leading effectively requires an understanding of employees’ personalities, values, and attitudes.
While perceiving our surroundings, we go beyond the objective information available to us and our perception is affected by our values, needs, and emotions. There are many biases that affect human perception of objects, self, and others. When perceiving the physical environment, we fill in the gaps and extrapolate from the available information. When perceiving others, stereotypes influence our behavior. Stereotypes may lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. Stereotypes are perpetuated because of our tendency to pay selective attention to aspects of the environment and ignore information inconsistent with our beliefs. Understanding the perception process gives us clues to understanding human behavior.
When employees leave, their jobs still need to be performed by someone, so companies spend time recruiting, hiring, and training new employees, all the while suffering from lower productivity. Yet, not all turnover is bad. Turnover is particularly a problem when high-performing employees leave, while a poor performer’s leaving may actually give the company a chance to improve productivity and morale.
Personality psychology—with its different ways of organizing, measuring, and understanding individual differences—can help people better grasp and articulate what they are like and how they compare to others. But the details of personality are relevant to more than just a person's self-image.
In the Big Five model, each individual falls somewhere on a continuum for each trait—compared to the rest of the population, a person may rate relatively high or low on a trait such as extraversion or agreeableness, or on more specific facets of each (such as assertiveness or compassion).
From eccentric and introverted to boisterous and bold, the human personality is a complex and colorful thing. Personality refers to a person's distinctive patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. It derives from a mix of innate dispositions and inclinations along with environmental factors and experiences.
A common perception about narcissists is that they are loud, over-the-top, and extremely visible in their sense of grandiosity and their feelings of superiority over others. That's not the case for the covert narcissist.
The tendencies in thinking and behaving that concepts like the Big Five represent are related to a variety of other characteristics and outcomes on which people compare to one another. These include differences in personal success, health and well-being, and how people get along with others.