Impacts on Individual Behavior

Impacts on Individual Behavior

Individual behavior is the pattern of thought, behavior, and emotion, unique to an individual, and the way one interacts to help or hold back the change of a person to other people and situations. Within organizations, diversity can positively or negatively impact an individual's behavior. The workplace is responsible and held accountable for making the overall work environment favorable for all within the setting. Diversity is created by a number of characteristics including gender, age, education, life stages, religious beliefs, disability, sexual orientation, and personality. Many diverse issues exist within the workplace. However, age, gender, personality traits, and sexual orientation highly impact individual behaviors.

Generational differences can have a diverse impact on individual behavior with regard to age differences. These differences can become a big disruption, hurt morale, and teamwork, unless managers learn how to adjust to the uniqueness of each group (Gomolski, 2001). Typically older persons tend to take work related responsibilities very serious unlike their younger counterparts. Older employees take pride in doing a job well where younger employees want to just get the job done and move on to the next assignment. Although each person is working toward the same goals, due to the age difference, the approach or techniques used to reach these goals may vary. The key is to get all workers focused on the goal, rather than ones different approaches to meeting that goal. The goal will prove to be the common ground in an age-diverse workforce (Gomolski, 2001).

Personality is defined as enduring patterns in a person's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors across situations (Williams, 2005). Personality traits are behavioral differences. Since personality refers to the way a person behaves, the behavioral approach says simply focus upon the individual's behavior. If one wants to change the person's personality all one needs to do is change their behavior. Personality consists of traits that tend to lead to characteristic responses. People can be described in terms of the ways they behave, such as whether they are outgoing and friendly, or whether they are dominant and assertive. Some individuals show more consistent behavior. Traits may only emerge in some situations; traits do not have a constant influence on behavior, their influence comes and goes. Some situations allow expression of personal behavior, while others provoke a narrow range of behavior (e.g., situation is strongly predictive of behavior of people being held up during a bank robbery, where personality is strongly predictive of behavior during an intriguing music session). Being aware of the diverse personalities of the people one interacts with helps one to understand why one acts the way one does and how to get most out of them. Appreciating personality diversity means respecting the strengths and limitations of each individual, and knowing how to make the most out of each individual's strengths. A persons personality habits can exist from how that person was raised or taught as a child as well as from adult experiences on jobs or just with life. Individual behavior within organizations stems from the different personalities of the staff members. These differences have the potential to either cause problems for or efficiently help an organization to obtain goals if one is properly trained to co-exist with each other in an organizational setting. Therefore, the groups that work the best are made up of members with diverse personalities who learn to appreciate and put to use each other's strengths. An appreciation for personality diversity should be shown by managers. People display their traits by what they do, including choice of situations, career, relationships, and lifestyle.

Gender differences are a major factor within organizations. The fact that opportunity and pay are equal is crucial. It not accurate however, to think that men and women are the same. Each gender has different methods and styles of achieving goals within the organization however, due to the many differences between them tend to leave room for conflict. As human beings, women and men share many of the same experiences and expectations, however; as individuals they are each entirely unique (Hahn, Litwin, 1995). Men see themselves as engaged in a hierarchical social order in which they are either "one up or one down" in relation to