The Changing Organization

Introduction

In Human Resource Management, personality indicators have become important because of the belief that they provide a way of connecting the demands of given social and task environments with individual potential behaviour, including performance. Their traditional primary utility is as screening vehicles for potential employees prior to more costly formal interview procedures. Connecting mind with decision-making and overt behaviour is conceptually axiomatic, and is traditionally the domain of cognitive theorists (Baron, 1982), who are seen as concerned directly with overt behaviour. However, connecting cognitive orientations with particular forms of behaviour for either individual or collective agencies is feasible using personality evaluations, given appropriate theory and a proper understanding of the pragmatic utility that can be created. Most generally, this field of study can be referred to psychosocial dynamics (Garcia, 2006), with those who work in this area often having a special interest in exploring the pathologies that drive socially problematic behaviour (Yolles, 2009a).

One of the earliest significant approaches to personality evaluation came from Jung in the early 1920s, when he developed a model of temperament. Temperament is basically connected to emotions and preferences (Gross, 2008), in contrast to cognitions which may be taken as being connected with epistemic meanings and processes of rationality. Cognition arises from epistemic beliefs and is a property of the mind which imparts the faculty of knowing, perceiving, or conceiving. It represents knowledge with degrees of certainty that are seen as ‘truths’ about our ‘reality’. So cognitions are mental processes, and they may have attitudinal attributes that are the result of belief imperatives, with propositional content that is vectored towards some object of attention. Whether one is interested in temperament or in cognitions, both can be associated with personality differences. Jung linked this dynamic to YinYang processes of the mind, a term which he later replaced by the Greek word enantiodromia, and which we shall refer to by the use of the simpler word enantiomer. To explain these terms, Jung's enantiodromia are personality states that occur in dichotomously opposite and interactive pairs. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a development from this, but the term enantiodromia was dropped, and MBTI deals instead with psychological functions that together with paired values of social attitude combine in certain ways to generate personality patterns called types (Pittenger, 1993).