Individual Difference

The world is being re-shaped by the convergence of social, mobile, cloud, big data, community and other powerful forces. The combination of these technologies unlocks an incredible opportunity to connect everything together in a new way and is dramatically transforming the way we live and work-Marc Benioff

These days’ online learning platforms such as Coursera, Edx, Linkedin-Learning etc. empowered us achieving a new level of intellectual engagement. I was doing a course in psychology at work, obvious for an HR professional to feel inclined towards organisational matters. However, the first module was on individual difference, can anyone imagine how fascinating this subject is for an HR person? I came across a new insight from a psychologist perspective, while delving into this topic. Excited to share an overall idea of this module.

We spend our a third of our lives at work. We even spend more time thinking about work. It's fair to say work is a highly significant part of our lives. And yet, this part of our life is often not as pleasant or meaningful as we would like it to be because of various factors. One of the factor is individual difference which we encounter every time at work, when we fail to identify and embrace it creates a huge problem in both our professional as well as personal life.

We all know that people are different from each other. Not only in the way that they look, but also in their personalities and abilities. We know that human beings share the same basic form. And yet we can vary in so many different ways. Not just in terms of how we look, but also how we feel, how we view the world, what we're good at, what we like doing, and what we don't like doing. We also vary in how smart we are, and how we behave in different situations and these variations are called individual differences.

Let’s focus on the two types of individual differences that psychologists have spent the longest time studying. These are cognitive ability and personality. Cognitive ability is also sometimes called intelligence. When psychologists talk about cognitive ability, they're referring to our capacity to learn, reason, problem solve, plan, think abstractly, and comprehend complex ideas. Where personality is how people vary in this way. We can think of personality as being a person's unique and relatively stable patterns of behaviour, thoughts, and emotions. Cognitive ability is what determines our reasoning power and problem solving power, whereas our personality tells us about our behaviour and the types of behaviour we tend to default to.

Cognitive ability/ Intelligence:

Looking at a very popular model called Carrol's Three-Stratum Theory. At the top of this model, is this thing we like to call G. G represents one's general cognitive ability, and it is thought to drive our overall ability to solve problems. In the second tier of Carroll's model, there are eight families of abilities which are thought of as broad abilities. So examples of these include fluid intelligence, crystallised intelligence, memory, retrieval ability, cognitive speediness, and processing speed. These are thought to be determined partly by G, but they also represent our unique strengths and weaknesses. Down at the very bottom we see the highly specific abilities, and these are thought to be driven partly by our broader abilities. All up though, we can see from the model, that there are a great number of specific abilities, but ultimately they are being driven very strongly by this G factor that sits at the top. 

There are other models of cognitive ability out there, but most of them take on this same basic form, general ability sitting at the top and specific abilities sitting at the bottom. In 1998, Frank Schmidt and John Hunter summarised over 85 years of research that looked at the relationship between various measures of individual difference that are often used by organisations to make selection decisions and performance on the job. They found that cognitive ability was the single strongest predictor of performance in a very broad range of jobs. Here we can see a chart showing the observed relationship between some of the more commonly used selection tools and job performance. And we can see that cognitive ability is the clear winner. So, it is clear that cognitive ability is important to work

.Myths about cognitive ability in the workplace

1-    First, there is the myth that cognitive ability only matters in complex jobs. In other words, there might be some jobs out there that are so simple, that cognitive ability really wouldn't make any difference. Well, this turns out not to be true. John Hunter looked at how well cognitive ability tests predicted performance in over 500 different organisational roles. The chart shows the relationships Hunter observed between cognitive ability on the X axis and job performance on the Y axis. The green line shows the relationship between the two that Hunter observed in highly complex jobs. Unsurprisingly, this relationship is strong and positive. That is, in complex jobs, smarter people tend to perform better. But, Hunter also observed quite a strong relationship in jobs of moderate complexity, as the yellow line shows. This was also true even in very simple jobs, as we see in the blue line. The relationship is weaker, but it is not weak overall. So even in relatively simple jobs cognitive ability matters.

2-    The second myth is this idea that there is some sort of magic amount of cognitive ability. Where having more than this magic amount will not actually help us perform any better. But this seems to be wrong too. A study of military personnel suggested that if anything, performance accelerates as cognitive ability approaches very high levels. We can see from this chart that the differences in the slopes as cognitive ability increases is very subtle. But it is reliable, so that myth has been well and truly busted as well. While cognitive ability does show an impressively strong relationship with job performance, it is important to realise that it is only one part of a very complex puzzle. Knowing that a person is very smart tells us nothing about how friendly, team oriented, organised, socially engaging, or diligent they are as a worker.

 Personality:

The human personality is very complex. It can vary in just so many different ways. One very popular method psychologist came up with was to use this concept of personality types. The basic idea of this system is that all members of a personality type are similar to each other. But they're different from members of other personality types. Though it's nice to think that we all fall into different types, the reality is that people are far more complex than that. These days, most psychologists prefer to use trait-based approaches to modelling human personality. The basic idea behind the trait-based approach is that there exists a set of dimensions which called personality traits.

Each of us sits at a point along all of these dimensions. Most people have probably heard of the trait extraversion. People who are very high on extraversion tend to be sociable and outgoing. Introversion is the opposite of extraversion. It means quiet and reserved. Now, the bell curve shows how we vary along that trait. We observe this bell-shaped pattern on almost every trait We can see from the shape of the curve that most of us are in the middle part. The further away from the middle we move, the more extreme and rare that level of the personality trait is. This graph shows how we can vary on the trait extraversion. There are perhaps several thousand very narrow personality traits that we might try to measure. But research has shown that human personality can be pretty well summarised by five or maybe six broader personality traits. 

The dominant five trait model is now known as the Big Five. And it suggests that people's personality can be neatly summarised by five independent dimensions. These five dimensions are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability. The six trait model, which is known as HEXACO, includes an additional dimension called honesty-humility.

Nowadays, psychologists tend to rely on questionnaires. These questionnaires usually involve asking participants to respond to self-descriptive statements. The basic idea is that each of these statements gives us a sliver of information about that person's personality. But together, the statements combine to tell us about their standing on broader personality traits. Now, let's look at personality in the workplace. Whereas cognitive ability tells us a lot about what a person can do, personality tells us about what a person is willing to do and how they might go about doing it. We can use personality traits to predict many outcomes that are relevant to the world of work. For example, conscientiousness has been shown to predict performance across many jobs and extraversion has been shown to predict performance in jobs like sales or managerial roles. Personality can also be used to predict negative work outcomes.

For example, people who are less agreeable seem to be more inclined to withdraw from their work and people who are less honest tend to engage in activities like counterproductive work behaviours, like stealing or taking longer breaks. The important thing to remember is that personality tells us about how we typically behave, and so it can affect what we choose to do. Quite often, however, it is the situation that determines how we behave. For example, even the most extroverted person will probably stay quiet when in a library and even the least conscientious person will try to work hard when the boss is watching them. In strong situations like these, personality does not determine our behaviour so much. Our personality is likely to be most important in situations where we have the freedom to choose how we behave. Most modern theories of personality now discuss how situations we face can combine with our traits to predict our behaviour in the workplace.