Individual at work: Physical Characteristics, skills and Personality

Abstract

Organisations in their collective sense are composed of individual human beings. These individuals act out their working lives within the framework of an organizational structure and in the context of particular organisational culture. Kreitner (1995) states that researchers and practising managers have focused much effort on studying people in small groups and as individuals. In so doing they have discovered that differences between indiyiduals, are as important as their common features. An individual at work is perceived by others in three principal ways: • As a physical person having gender, age, race, size and characteristics, • As a person with a range of abilities (i.e. intellectual, physical and social); • As a personality (i.e. some one having a particular kind of temperament). Accepting that each person, ultimately, is a unique blend of all three dimensions, it is nevertheless important, from an organizational behaviour perspective, to ask whether it is possible to categorise individuals in some way. Much of the work on measurement of human performance is devoted to developing standards of comparison between individuals. This enables us to describe individuals in terms of broad types, such as similar ability groups and personality types.