Psychology (peoples behaviour) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Psychology (peoples behaviour) - Essay Example 1 This is one approach of personality theory. Personality is normally referred to as the thoughts, emotions and behaviour pattern that every person has. Personality trait can have immense variations between individuals. Many research hypotheses concur that personality has aspects that are prominent. They are very stable across situations that are referred to as shamone traits. Eysenck 1967 says that personality can be reduced to three traits that are quite major. Other scholars however, say that personality can be reduced to five traits. According to the 3F model, there are traits like psychoticism, neuroticism and extraversion. Other scholars say that personality can be reduced to the following five traits, that is, neuroticism, agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness and openness. All these are based on factor analysis which is a statistical technique. In fact these traits are the highest level factors in the hierarchical taxonomy of this technique. This method is well known to produce bipolar and continuous factors. All these actually describe one's individual differences. The trait theory is based on various assumptions. One of them is that people are normally born with traits that are inherited. The trait theory asserts that these traits are quite different fro one person to another though some people may have similar traits that they inherited from parents or even grandparents etc. Some of these traits that are inherited can be suited for carrying out leadership responsibilities. In this case a person finds that he or she can easily handle leadership tasks without having any prior knowledge in the field. According to the trait theory, people who naturally make good leaders just have sufficient or the right combination of these traits. Inherent traits can be diverse such that one person may have many different traits. There are people who may have minimal traits that are inherited while others may have so many. Early researches that were done concerning the trait theory used successful leaders as the audience. So the attention was majorly based on discovering the inherent traits that made them to be successful. There was the assumption that if other people were found with the same traits then it meant that they had the potential of becoming great leaders too. One of the scholars called Stogdill (1974) noted that the following skills and traits were very critical to leaders; Traits Skills Adaptable to situations Alert to social environment Ambitious and achievement-orientated Assertive Cooperative Decisive Dependable Dominant (desire to influence others) Energetic (high activity level) Clever (intelligent) Conceptually skilled Creative Diplomatic and tactful Fluent in speaking Knowledgeable about group task Organized (administrative ability) Persuasive Source; Stogdill, R. (1974): Handbook of leadership; a survey of the literature; New York; Free Press Eysenck (1997) asserts that majority of extroverts have got low levels of cortical arousal as compared to introverts who have higher levels. According to the 3F model, individual differences in neuroticism and extraversion have physiological and genetic antecedents.2 Psychodynamics theory This is actually