Personality traits

Chapter 2 showed that individual learning is considered a component of organizational learning (Kim, 1993). Organizational learning is a mixture of individual, group and an organizational level of learning. Individual learning is recommended as the first step of learning at the social level, through which alternative solutions to organizational issues are recognized based on individual experience (Crossan et al., 1999). As important as individual learning is to organizational learning, individuals’ characteristics may, to some extent, be able to explain organizational learning.

Despite the recognition of the importance that individual learning processes have on the organization, little research has been conducted in estimating the effect of

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individual characteristics such as personality traits on organizational learning. Personality is a psychological concept while learning is mostly cognitive. Huber’s (1991) framework (see above) has the potential to explain how the effects of personality can be transferred to cognitive learning. This is easily done if one realizes that information distribution, for example, requires a particular prosocial personality to be executed. Or, for example, knowledge interpretation is mostly based on social psychological mechanisms that operate together with the most obvious cognitive processes. In other words, the characterization of Huber’s model provided above indicates that workers’ personalities are extremely important to understand proactive engagement in organizational knowledge processes.

This research adopts the Big Five personality traits to understand the relationship between personality traits and organizational learning. The reason for selecting Big Five is because it is a dominant framework that is used for personnel selection (Hurtz & Donovan, 2000). Modern personality research uses the Big Five to systematically categorize personality traits at the broadest level (Flynn, Chatman & Spataro, 2001). The Big Five are also considered as a ‘parsimonious and comprehensive’ way to describe the human sphere (Gupta, 2008). The Big Five traits comprise neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience and conscientiousness.

The study in this chapter focuses on three traits, namely, conscientiousness, openness to experience and neuroticism. This is because the literature suggests that conscientiousness and neuroticism are robust and consistent predictors of job attitudes (Judge & Ilies, 2002). Openness to experience is often used to explain knowledge sharing and decision making in organizations (LePine, Colquitt & Erez, 2000; Matzler, Renzl, Müller, Herting & Mooradian, 2008). Therefore, these three traits should be particularly relevant in understanding the relationship between

185 personality traits and organizational learning.

Openness to experience. Openness to experience is often linked with characteristics

such as being imaginative, open-minded, aesthetic sensitivity, originality and intellectual curiosity (Barrick & Mount, 1991). People with high level of openness are willing to engage in self-monitoring and assessment which is necessary for identifying learning possibilities (Blickle, 1996). Open individuals tend to try new things, experience different feelings and embrace changes (LePine et al., 2000). Hence, open individuals are more ready to participate in learning (Barrick & Mount, 1991) and tend to have a high learning orientation (Matzler, Renzl, Mooradian, von Krogh & Mueller, 2011b). Individuals high in openness to experience are more willing to query other people’s insight and share their own knowledge, it is anticipated that open individuals are more likely to involve knowledge acquisition and dissemination with teams (Matzler et al., 2008).

(Note: Numbering hypothesis continues from the previous chapter in order to be

consistent with the framework developed at Chapter 2).

Hypothesis 5a: Openness to experience is positively related to organizational

learning.

Conscientiousness. Conscientious people are considered to be independent,

organized, responsible, achievement oriented and perseverant (Barrick & Mount, 1991). People who are perseverant tend to be committed to their goals regardless of

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difficulties they are facing, and they are more likely to weigh different information in order to accomplish tasks (LePine et al., 2000). People who assess different information might have a more accurate interpretation resulting in better decision making than people who are less conscientious (LePine et al., 2000). Furthermore, empirical studies on organizational citizenship found that conscientiousness drives people to work on extra things which go beyond their job requirement, and conscientious people also enjoy working with other people in a team and help organizations as a whole (Organ, 1994). It is rational to predict that people enjoying affiliation in organizations may be more likely willing to exchange information resulting in better knowledge sharing in organizations. Empirical research among IT professionals has showed that a high level of conscientiousness is positively related to tacit knowledge sharing (Borges, 2013). Highly conscientious people also show high tendencies of documenting knowledge for organizational usage (Matzler et al., 2011a). While new knowledge is institutionalized, it will become part of organizational memory to guide future decision-making. Consequently, it will contribute to organizational learning.

Hypothesis 6a: Conscientiousness is positively related to organizational learning

Neuroticism. Neuroticism sometimes is labeled as “emotionality” and “negative

affectivity” (Watson & Clark, 1984). People with high neuroticism are likely to experience a high degree of negative affect such as anxiety, stress, and depression and negative self-assessment (Gore, Kiefner, & Combs, 2012). Highly neurotic people are less happy to share tacit knowledge (Borges, 2013), it is more challenging for them to adjust in new circumstances (Gore et al., 2012), they tend to be less satisfied with their job (Barrick, Mount & Judge, 2001) and are more likely to remember negative experiences that happened in the workplace (Watson & Clark,

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1984). In terms of organizational learning, this requires employees’ participation in detecting and correcting the problematic aspects of their own behavior, and in turn, it improves the processes of large organizations (Mazutis, Slawinski & Slaiwinski, 2008). Highly neurotic people are less confident in promoting their own opinions and handle criticism from other people in a way that has negative repercussions on themselves (Borges, 2013). Organizational learning often involves negotiation and argument in order to achieve a shared mental map before learning happens (Huber, 1991) and neurotic people may find the process stressful.

Hypothesis 7a: Neuroticism is negatively related to organizational learning.

6.3 Organizational Defensive Routines

As previous chapters already suggested that social virtues are learned from early life and become guidance to behavior in later work life for handling situations which normally elicit embarrassment or threat to themselves or others. However, in the organizational context, the disposition to be nice to colleagues could motivate people to self-censoring or sugarcoating important organizational information. In turn, this may result in destructive behavior in organizations. This section explains ODRs from a social cognition view.

The way how organizational culture influences on individuals’ behavior can be explained from a social cognitive studies in that they propose that social context influences an individual’s way of interpreting information people generate or information received from other people (Fiske & Taylor, 2013). In particular, attribution theory suggests that individual’s behavior is an outcome of personal attributions and contextual attribution (Augoustinos, Walker & Donaghue, 2009). In this study’s context, individuals who perform defensive routines do that because they

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focus on avoidance of negative consequences and they are preoccupied of staying in control with an organizational culture which treats failure as embarrassment (Secchi & Bardone, 2013).

According to Bandura (2012), people learn their behavior via interpersonal influences with other people by observation. In return, their learnt behavior will shape or reinforce the external environment (Bandura, 2012). For defensive routines, individuals design mixed messages to avoid evoking embarrassment for themselves or others. However, the message receivers recognize the inconsistency of the information, but sometimes decide to be in congruence with the message senders’ way of dealing with the source of embarrassment. This double-blind way to conceal the cause of embarrassment makes ODRs identification a real challenge (Argyris, 2001). As a consequence, individuals behave defensively because it is socially acceptable.