Personality, Intelligence and Perception

Personality, Intelligence and Perception

The twenty-first century has proved to be one of globalization and technology which has connected the world in an unprecedented way. Teamwork and cooperation have become necessities for an individual as well as a country to survive and stay competitive in today’s global society. Communication and understanding are the key components to overcoming the diverse nature of cultures and styles of work. After reading the chapter on Personality, Learning and Perception, I better understand how each one of these three components affect human relations and performance. It also inspired me to think about how to apply these concepts to my relationships with other people in teamwork settings in order to maximize our performance.

In this chapter, the author discussed three main concepts of Personality, Intelligence and Perception and their applications to teamwork. In the first section, he defined the concept of Personality in a more comprehensive and academic manner-- “Personality is a relatively stable set of traits aids in explaining and predicting individual behavior” (41). He also categorized Personality into five big groups which can be applied to most people. One’s personality type influences how much a person would be affected by stress, which can lead to decreased performance. The application of the Personality concept helps us to better understand ourselves and others in order to improve performance and relationships. The author continued on to discuss people’s differing levels of intelligence and the four major learning styles. He contends that besides having difference personalities, people also tend to have different learning styles too. For example, some combine doing and feeling as an “Accommodation” whiles others observing and thinking as an “Assimilator”. The different ways in which one interprets and acts on a situation is one of the reasons people find it difficult to work with other people. It takes serious effort to work productively with people who are different from you. The last concept the author introduced was Perception, or as he defines it, “a person’s interpretation of reality.” (56) Perception is very common in many situations especially in a global diverse work environment.

Among the three main concepts, I found the Personality concept and its application the most interesting and insightful. From my previous experience, I was always shocked and sometimes frustrated by the different ways in which people act and respond to situations. These differences are often barriers to communication and cooperation with others in a group setting. One negative experience with group work was working on a sociology paper with my partner, Nick. It was extremely hard because we had completely different methods of working and accomplishing tasks. I preferred to complete work sooner than later while he always waited until the last minute. I planned two meetings per week and he felt that I was too pushy. At that time, I lacked ability to notice that our personalities were different, if not opposite. Having not recognized this, I was unable to alter my behavior in order to accommodate his personality.

Nick and I never learned to work through our differences and produced a finished product that neither of us was very proud of. We ended the group work feeling very poorly about the other mainly due to our lack of understanding of each other’s personalities. After studying this chapter, I now understand that we need to apply better interpersonal and intrapersonal skills to overcome the conflict. As the chapter suggested, I will try to predict my partner’s personal type and his potential behavior in order to achieve to best result. In addition, I will ask myself whether my behavior will help or hurt the relationship and whether or not I should