Richard Branson: Development of an Entrepreneur

1.1 Executive Summary

The essay covers details about Personalities and individuals in the organisations and how they influence behaviour amongst managers and the said employees with regards to social perceptions. How these social perceptions influence managers in decision making and rewarding employees? What are the factors that influence social perception and the barriers to perception? Why people in general view and perceive things to be different. Do their personality traits influence a managers' decision making? The essay notifies and covers the following:

• Personality

• Big five Personality traits

• Personality characteristics in an organisations

• Social perception

• Barriers to social perception

• Using Personality, Perception and Attribution at work

How personality and trait theory analysis helps us break down behaviour patterns? Identifying characteristics of personality with reference to the big five model and how can an individual's personality be measured by MBTI and Carl Jung's indicator.

Another concept of behavioural pattern we come across is social perception and how all management activities rely on perception and cultural diversity in performance appraisal, bonuses and conflict especially when it involves sexual harassment charges between two employees.

Further more in this essay we cover attributions in the workplace and how they affect managerial behaviour. The attribution process and the stages involved with the potential common biases that managers face while forming attributions about certain cultures.

1.2 Introduction

Personality can be defined as traits we all possess with a distinct pattern of characteristics not fully duplicated in any other person. Furthermore, this pattern of traits tends to be stable over time. (Greenberg, 2011). Thus, by stating this, if one manager knows that an employee has shown traits of confidence, optimism during one presentation he can then trust the same employee to show the same traits of confidence and optimism in another situation to carry out further tasks in the organisation. Personality thus plays an important role in organisations. With personality there are two kinds, namely a Type ‘A' Personality and a Type ‘B' Personality. Psychologists over a time have tried emphasising the role of either an Internal (person) factors or external (situational) factors. A person with an internal factor personality will always blame himself for his/her failure to carry out a certain work task while as a person with external factor personality blames everything outside his/her control (situation) that prevented