PERSONALITY, PERCEPTION, ATTRIBUTION, ATTITUDES AND VALUES

Personality: relatively stable set of characteristics that influence an individual’s behavior.

The integrative approach and the “Big Five” personality traits help to identify characteristics of personality

Perception: people attempt to understand and make sense of the information received from the environment. Is affected by internal and external factors.

The cross-cultural work environment has influence on perception and makes the task of working together, difficult; (Analoui, 1998; Analoui and Karami, 2002). Differing perceptions might provoke conflicts resulting in ineffective work relationships (Hofstede, 1991)

Attribution Theory (Heider, 1958): explains how individuals pinpoint the causes of their own behavior and that of others.

Internal: controllable

External: not controllable

Fundamental attribution error (Jones and Harris, 1967): overestimated perception might be wrong.

Actor-Observer effect (Storms, 1973; Baxter and Goldberg, 1988): other’s behavior caused by internal causes while own behavior by external ones.

Self-serving attribution (Zuckerman, 1979;Roesch and Amirkham, 1997): associate own success with internal factors and failure with external.

There is a causal relation between perception, behavior and organizational performance. Positive perception results in close human relationships and this results in good performance and is imperative for successful management. If there are cross-cultural projects, training should be included in order to remove misunderstandings.

ATTITUDE

“Psychological tendency expressed by evaluating an entity with some degree of favor or disfavor” (Harrison, D.A., Newman, D.A., Roth, P.L. 2006)

ABC MODEL

VALUES: enduring beliefs that a specific mode of conduct is personally or socially preferable to an opposite.

Not all the assets that a company has have the same strategic value. Intangible assets are more valuable like beliefs and values.

Capabilities are the routines of coordination of different resources. More original better competitive advantage (scarcity and value).

The main capabilities are:

Culture is conformed by the values and beliefs of the people within an organization.

Structure establishes the relationships in the organization.

Organizational learning: ability to adapt to changes and maintain competitive advantage. Innovation

Resources and capabilities determined the organizational personality and the way it performs.

To what do you attribute the success of JICA?

I believe JICA’s successful comes directly from the professionalism of its aid workers. They are perfectly chosen to do this work because they are volunteers and they have to pass threw different test that demonstrates their experience. They have had previous experience in the field they are committed in.  This organization is really well structured because they know that before starting a cross-cultural project is important to provide people with a prior formation and training on the other culture. JICA’s aid workers received a complete language program before leaving Japan to the other countries.

According to the study in September 2008, JICA’s aid workers’ have positive perception that causes positive behavior in local colleagues and result in higher organizational performance. Motivation and teamwork are important for Japanese organizations. For example, when Yasuko (aid worker here in Medellin) visited EAFIT, we can asked her the perceptions she had about Colombia before coming here and she only talked about Colombia’s good factors as the coffee, the emeralds, orchids and beautiful women, and she did it in a lovely way that demonstrate us that despite of the possible bad reputation the country has, people are also aware of the good things. Motivation and teamwork are important for Japanese organizations.

REFERENCES

1. Personality, Perception& Attribution; Attitudes& Values. Sin Kit I. Class 2011.
2. Takao Inamori, Farhad Analoui, “Beyond Pygmalion effect: the role of managerial perception”, Journal of Management Development, Vol. 29 Iss: 4, pp.306-321
3. Gregorio Martin-de-Castro, Jose Emilio Navas-Lopez, Pedro Lopez-Saez, Elsa Alama-Salazar, (2006) “Organizational Capital as Competitive Advantage of the firm”, Journal of intellectual Capital, Vol. 7 Iss:3, pp.324-337
4. Online. Available March 7, 2011 http://www.jica.go.jp/english/about/mission/index.html