| dc.description.abstract | Organisations in their collective sense are composed of individual human beings.
These individuals act out their working lives within the framework of an organizational
structure and in the context of particular organisational culture. Kreitner (1995) states that
researchers and practising managers have focused much effort on studying people in
small groups and as individuals. In so doing they have discovered that differences
between indiyiduals, are as important as their common features. An individual at work
is perceived by others in three principal ways:
• As a physical person having gender, age, race, size and
characteristics,
• As a person with a range of abilities (i.e. intellectual, physical and
social);
• As a personality (i.e. some one having a particular kind of
temperament).
Accepting that each person, ultimately, is a unique blend of all three dimensions,
it is nevertheless important, from an organizational behaviour perspective, to ask whether
it is possible to categorise individuals in some way. Much of the work on measurement of
human performance is devoted to developing standards of comparison between
individuals. This enables us to describe individuals in terms of broad types, such as
similar ability groups and personality types. | en_US |
