Person-situation Debate Research Articles

When subordinates do not follow: A typology of subordinate resistance as perceived by leaders

Whereas a plethora of research investigated subordinates who accept their leaders’ influence attempts (i.e., those who follow), we focus here on the reversed perspective, namely subordinates who decide not to follow their leaders’ requests. For example, a subordinate may intentionally lower their effort, regularly pass-off work tasks to colleagues, or take the leader for a fool. The purpose of the present study was to develop a conceptual account of this phenomenon. More specifically, we aimed to develop a classification of subordinate resistance as perceived by leaders that can guide future research on this multifaceted phenomenon. To achieve this goal, we conducted 40 semi-structured interviews with organizational leaders. We utilized topic modeling to map out five categories of subordinate resistance (i.e., entitlement, contact seeking/avoiding, effort minimization, emotionally fluctuating communication, and undermining team cohesion). In a second study (N = 1,229), we investigated the frequency with which leaders experienced each category of resistance, and explored leader-related antecedents (demographics, cognitive ability, personality) we well as situational antecedents (industry). We discuss a proposed nomological net of subordinate resistance, consequences that subordinates (and leaders) might face when engaging in (experiencing) subordinate resistance, and how the person–situation debate may contribute to understanding when subordinate resistance occurs.

Light magic at workplace due to empowering leadership: situation strength conceptions for intrapreneurial behaviour

PurposeThe present study enriches the person-situation debate by developing and testing a theoretical model on the nexus between empowering leadership (EL) and intrapreneurial behaviour (IB) in the presence of a strong organisational situation of perceived organisational support (POS).Design/methodology/approachCross-sectional survey data collected from 237 engineers working for Pakistani automakers were used to evaluate the suggested theoretical framework. The survey results were analysed using the partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) method.FindingsThe results from the analysed data revealed a significant and positive relationship between EL and IB. POS significantly moderate the relationship between EL and IB as per the conceptualisation of situation strength theory (SST) and is established as a strong organisational situation that generates situational cues for IB outcomes from employees.Originality/valueThe present study provides new insights into determining employees' workplace behaviour as viewed from the organisational situations. Hence, top management in organisations can create a conducive environment by improving employees' POS for valued work behaviours like IB.

Who exploits? The trusted one, the dark one, or both?

Trust represents one of the most complex phenomena in social settings, in that, while it is necessary for social interactions, it also renders one vulnerable to exploitation. Further, its examination stands at the crossroads of the person-situation debate due to its conceptualisation as a dispositional trait as well as a situational artefact. This study examined the role of dark traits and trust in promoting exploitative choices at the individual and situational levels. In a sample of working managers (Study 1), we hypothesised and investigated the moderating role of trust in the relationship between dark core and exploitation at the trait level. In a sample of prospective managers (Study 2), we examined the situational influence of social distance and reward on the propensity to behave exploitatively using a trust game. The findings revealed a positive moderating role of trust in both studies. Additionally, it was observed that dark core and trust significantly interacted with the inherent reward for defection and social distance to predict exploitation, self-interest, or benevolence across the situations. As managerial trust is essential, our study is relevant considering that dark individuals are increasingly rising in the organizational hierarchy.

Personality dynamics

Traditionally, personality psychology has been understood as the study of stability in people’s dispositions. However, a different strand of personality research has highlighted the importance of acknowledging and explaining the meaningful intraindividual variation in human thoughts, feelings, and behavior across different contexts and time. The goal of this paper is to review this strand, highlight current research, and outline key questions for future research. We summarize historical perspectives on the dynamic processes underlying the emergence of personality within and across individuals (e.g. the pioneering theorizing of Allport; the person-situation debate), recent theoretical and empirical advances in incorporating dynamic processes into the definition and assessment of personality (e.g., the study of personality states; dynamic approaches to personality including Cognitive Affective Personality System [CAPS], Whole Trait Theory, the Knowledge-and-Appraisal Personality Architecture [KAPA] framework, and Nonlinear Interaction of Person and Situation [NIPS]), and new directions in current research (e.g. idiographic approaches; understanding variability in narrative identity). We end with suggestions for future research.

Spending reflects not only who we are but also who we are around: The joint effects of individual and geographic personality on consumption.

Interactionist theories are considered to have resolved the classic person-situation debate by demonstrating that human behavior is most accurately described as a function of both personal characteristics as well as environmental cues. According to these theories, personality traits form part of the personal characteristics that drive behavior. We suggest that psychological theory stands to gain from also considering personality traits as an important environmental characteristic that shapes sociocultural norms and institutions, and, in turn, behavior. Building on research in geographical psychology, we support this proposition by presenting evidence on the relationship of individual and regional personality with spending behavior. Analyzing the spending records of 111,336 participants (31,915,942 unique transactions) across 374 Local Authority Districts (LAD) in the United Kingdom, we first show that geographic regions with higher aggregate scores on a given personality trait collectively spend more money on categories associated with that trait. Shifting the focus to individual level spending as our behavioral outcome (N = 1,716), we further demonstrate that regional personality of a participant's home LAD predicts individual spending above and beyond individual personality. That is, a person's spending reflects both their own personality traits as well as the personality traits of the people around them. We use conditional random forest predictions to highlight the robustness of these findings in the presence of a comprehensive set of individual and regional control variables. Taken together, our findings empirically support the proposition that spending behaviors reflect personality traits as both personal and environmental characteristics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Dispositional and situational factors at work

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the Core Self-Evaluations Scale (CSES) and the Brief Index of Affective Job Satisfaction (BIAJS) in terms of internal consistency and factor structure and to, subsequently, analyze the influence of a set of dispositional factors (namely, core self-evaluations, CSEs) and situational factors (namely, psychosocial factors) on job satisfaction.Design/methodology/approachIn total, 209 academics from an Argentinian university completed online surveys at two stages, separated in time, to reduce the common method bias.FindingsThe Spanish version of the CSES and the BIAJS showed acceptable psychometric properties, which were similar to those previously reported in North-American, European and Asian settings. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that both situational and dispositional factors are significant predictors of job satisfaction.Research limitations/implicationsThe CSES and the BIAJS seem to be valid and reliable instruments for assessing CSEs and job satisfaction, respectively, in Latin America. The adoption of an interactionist approach that includes both situational and dispositional factors is crucial in future research examining job satisfaction.Practical implicationsManagers should carefully evaluate the personality traits of candidates during personnel selection, as well as the working conditions they offer to their employees, since both factors seem to affect job satisfaction.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the validation of two scales that may promote future organizational behavior/psychology research in Latin America. In addition, it provides empirical evidence on the relative influence of a set of situational and dispositional factors on job satisfaction, thus contributing to the resolution of the person-situation debate.

Doing justice to the richness of personality: Introduction to the special issue "New Approaches to the Measurement of Personality: Translational Thoughts to Applied, Educational, and Clinical Settings".

Personality and its assessment are growth areas in the psychological literature and are important in applied practice. In the decades since personality reemerged as a viable scientific construct following the person-situation debate, we have learned much about the nature and full breadth of personality traits as well as refined methods for the assessment of personality characteristics. Indeed, the personality assessment literature currently is vibrant and now intersects with numerous other disciplines, including traditional psychometrics, developmental psychology and psychopathology, clinical psychology, neuroscience, industrial-organizational psychology, and educational and social psychology. This growth in the personality assessment literature inspired us to organize an expert meeting on personality assessment. This 2-day event-which was held in Oostduinkerke (Belgium) in September 2016-brought together junior and senior personality assessment researchers as well as a number of methodologists from around the world and focused on sharing modern viewpoints on personality assessment from a wide diversity of perspectives. Following the meeting, we envisioned this special issue, including papers from meeting attendees addressing topics that emerged from the discussion sessions and are the result of fruitful and often new collaborations. Although the papers were invited, all were subjected to critical peer review and underwent revisions prior to their publication here. In what follows, the overall rationale for the present special issue and the connection between the different papers will be outlined from an integrative perspective. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Assertiveness and curiosity: our next steps towards the NHS of the future.

In Rachel Handscombe’s previous article for the British Journal of General Practice she reflected on what training for a marathon can tell us about achieving and sustaining peak performance as a GP. Her prescription was ‘more rest, variety, encouragement, and acknowledgement that we are doing our best’ .1 This article is about the other side of the story, and it revolves around the person–situation debate (which has been raging since Sigmund Freud 130 years ago), that being: do we possess stable traits that can reliably predict the action we will take, or are we for the most part slaves to the situation? We struggle with the latter possibility because a sense of control is an important part of effective psychological functioning. However, an increasing number of psychologists are coming around to the view that we have far less agency than we think: ‘so decisions are being made, not by a conscious rational agent, but by the underlying [unconscious] processes. The rational self only notices the decisions being made and thinks that it is the author of these decisions.’ 2 The debate is highly relevant to the future of general …

Adding previous experiences to the person-situation debate of achievement emotions

When preparing for exams, students experience various achievement emotions, which are related to their perceived academic control and achievement regarding their exams. These emotions are shaped by a trait-like stable person-specific component and a state-like variable situation-specific component. Furthermore, it is plausible that students' previous emotional experiences might influence their current emotional experiences. Therefore, the present study aimed to disentangle those three components of achievement emotions (namely person, previous-experience, and situation specific components), and to analyze the extent to which these three components relate to perceived academic control and achievement. Using experience sampling, ninety-eight undergraduate students reported their emotions during the final week of exam preparation. Via latent state-trait theory models, including an autoregressive coefficient, our results showed the three expected variance components for enjoyment, anxiety, and anger, with no person-specific variance component for pride. The more stable components (namely person and previous-experience specific components) were significantly associated with perceived academic control and achievement, particularly for negative emotions. Moreover, results suggest a reciprocal relation between anxiety and perceived academic control. Implications for educators seeking to strengthen students' success are discussed.

Person-Situation Debate Revisited: Phase Transitions with Quenched and Annealed Disorders

We study the q-voter model driven by stochastic noise arising from one out of two types of nonconformity: anticonformity or independence. We compare two approaches that were inspired by the famous psychological controversy known as the person–situation debate. We relate the person approach with the quenched disorder and the situation approach with the annealed disorder, and investigate how these two approaches influence order–disorder phase transitions observed in the q-voter model with noise. We show that under a quenched disorder, differences between models with independence and anticonformity are weaker and only quantitative. In contrast, annealing has a much more profound impact on the system and leads to qualitative differences between models on a macroscopic level. Furthermore, only under an annealed disorder may the discontinuous phase transitions appear. It seems that freezing the agents’ behavior at the beginning of simulation—introducing quenched disorder—supports second-order phase transitions, whereas allowing agents to reverse their attitude in time—incorporating annealed disorder—supports discontinuous ones. We show that anticonformity is insensitive to the type of disorder, and in all cases it gives the same result. We precede our study with a short insight from statistical physics into annealed vs. quenched disorder and a brief review of these two approaches in models of opinion dynamics.

New Directions in Personality Research - Where Do We Go Now?

As House, Shane, and Herald (1996) note, dispositional research (of which personality is a subset) has enhanced our understanding of organizational behavior and has important implications for practitioners. Unfortunately, however, the validity of personality research for predicting organizational outcomes, like job performance, is still questioned and acknowledged as relatively low (e.g. Barrick, Mount, & Judge, 2001; Morgeson, Campion, Dipboye, Hollenbeck, Murphy, & Schmitt, 2007; Murphy, 2005), despite the research stream being credited for its progress taxonomically (McCrae & Costa, 1997). There is room for optimism, however, as scholars in the past few years have made significant advancements in personality research. Therefore, the purpose of this panel symposium is to bring established personality scholars together to discuss both the new advancements in personality research and the gaps and issues that still remain. Thus, this panel symposium aims to encourage the advancement of personality research by scholars through the discussion of methodological, theoretical, and research design issues (and corresponding recommendations) on personality research. Specific topics include, but are not limited to: the person-situation debate, situational strength vs. trait activation, multiple personality measurement issues, and alternatives to the Big Five.

Lessons and new directions for extended cognition from social and personality psychology

This paper aims to expand the range of empirical work relevant to the extended cognition debates. First, I trace the historical development of the person-situation debate in social and personality psychology and the extended cognition debate in the philosophy of mind. Next, I highlight some instructive similarities between the two and consider possible objections to my comparison. I then argue that the resolution of the person-situation debate in terms of interactionism lends support for an analogously interactionist conception of extended cognition. I argue that this interactionism might necessitate a shift away from the dominant agent-artifact paradigm toward an agent–agent paradigm. If this is right, then social and personality psychology—the discipline(s) that developed from the person-situation debate—opens a whole new range of empirical considerations for extended cognition theorists which align with Clark & Chalmers original vision of agents themselves as spread into the world.

Personlighed og jobsucces

This article addresses the issue: Can personality tests be used to predict job success? For this purpose, we initially recap the historical person-situation debate that left a fundamental scepticism regarding the existence of personality. Then we illustrate how the personality conceptwithstood the criticism and yet again became a relevant research subject. This is done by reviewing a newly gained conceptual consensus via the Five-Factor Model, as well as the consolidation and development of meta-analytic and corrective validity generalisation methods.To investigate the relationship between personality and job success we subsequently summarise the first two early 1990s meta-analyses in this field. Finally, a perspective is undertaken on the basis of Robert Hogan in relation to collect, interpret, and apply psychometric data in a business context ending up with three conclusions: (1) the generalised relationship between personality and job success is at best moderate; (2) the “successful employee” varies with the situational demands of a given employment; (3) if one wishes for stronger validities for personality tests in the IO-context a carefully prepared job profile is necessary.

Teaching This Class Drives Me Nuts!--Examining the Person and Context Specificity of Teacher Emotions.

Teachers’ emotions are critically important for the quality of classroom instruction, and they are key components of teachers’ psychological well-being. Past research has focused on individual differences between teachers, whereas within-teacher variation across contexts has rarely been considered. As such, the present research addresses the long-standing yet unresolved person-situation debate pertaining to the emotional experiences of teachers. In two diary studies (N = 135, 70% female, and N = 85, 28% female), we examined the role of person, academic subject, and group of students for teacher emotions; focusing on three of the most salient emotions found in teachers: enjoyment, anger, and anxiety. Findings from multi-level analysis confirmed the person specificity of enjoyment, anger, and, in particular, anxiety. In addition, underscoring the existence of within-teacher variability, findings supported that teachers’ emotions considerably varied depending on the subject and group of students taught, particularly so for enjoyment and anger. Implications of the person and context specificity of teacher emotions are discussed in relation to assessments and intervention programs aiming to improve teachers’ emotional lives in the classroom.

Is the person-situation debate important for agent-based modeling and vice-versa?

BackgroundAgent-based models (ABM) are believed to be a very powerful tool in the social sciences, sometimes even treated as a substitute for social experiments. When building an ABM we have to define the agents and the rules governing the artificial society. Given the complexity and our limited understanding of the human nature, we face the problem of assuming that either personal traits, the situation or both have impact on the social behavior of agents. However, as the long-standing person-situation debate in psychology shows, there is no consensus as to the underlying psychological mechanism and the important question that arises is whether the modeling assumptions we make will have a substantial influence on the simulated behavior of the system as a whole or not.Methodology/Principal FindingsStudying two variants of the same agent-based model of opinion formation, we show that the decision to choose either personal traits or the situation as the primary factor driving social interactions is of critical importance. Using Monte Carlo simulations (for Barabasi-Albert networks) and analytic calculations (for a complete graph) we provide evidence that assuming a person-specific response to social influence at the microscopic level generally leads to a completely different and less realistic aggregate or macroscopic behavior than an assumption of a situation-specific response; a result that has been reported by social psychologists for a range of experimental setups, but has been downplayed or ignored in the opinion dynamics literature.SignificanceThis sensitivity to modeling assumptions has far reaching consequences also beyond opinion dynamics, since agent-based models are becoming a popular tool among economists and policy makers and are often used as substitutes of real social experiments.

The Person–Situation Debate Revisited: Effect of Situation Strength and Trait Activation on the Validity of the Big Five Personality Traits in Predicting Job Performance

Derived from two theoretical concepts--situation strength and trait activation--we develop and test an interactionistmodel governing the degree to which five-factormodel personality traits are related to job performance. One concept--situation strength--was hypothesized to predict the validities of all of the Big Five traits, while the effects of the other--trait activation--were hypothesized to be specific to each trait. Based on this interactionist model, personality--performance correlations were located in the literature, and occupationally homogeneous jobs were coded according to their theoretically relevant contextual properties. Results revealed that all five traits were more predictive of performance for jobs in which the process by which the work was done represented weak situations (e.g., work was unstructured, employee had discretion to make decisions). Many of the traits also predicted performance in job contexts that activated specific traits (e.g., extraversion better predicted performance in jobs requiring social skills, agreeableness was less positively related to performance in competitive contexts, openness was more strongly related to performance in jobs with strong innovation/ creativity requirements). Overall, the study's findings supported our interactionist model in which the situation exerts both general and specific effects on the degree to which personality predicts job performance

The Person-situation Debate and the Assessment of Situations

While the person-situation debate was largely based on a misunderstanding of the magnitude of the correlations that characterize relations between personality traits and behavior, it drew much-needed attention to the importance of situations. However, few attempts have been made to understand the important elements of situations in relation to behavior. Current work developing the Riverside Situational Q-sort (RSQ) aims to provide a useful way to conceptualize and measure the behaviorally important attributes of situations. A current project is applying this method cross-culturally. New data from the US and Japan show that behavioral correlates of two elements of the situation—the presence of a member of the opposite sex and the experience of being criticized by others—have largely similar behavioral correlates between genders and across cultures. ese analyses illustrate how the RSQ illuminates the connections between situations and behavior. Future research will extend such analyses to more situational attributes and other cultures around the world.

Situationism and the Concept of a Situation

Abstract: The concept of a situation underlying the debate between moral situationists and dispositionists conceals various underexplored complexities. Some of those issues have been engaged recently in the so‐called psychology of situations, but they have been slow to receive attention in mainstream philosophy. I invoke various distinctions among situations, and show how situationists have selectively chosen certain types of situations that, for conceptual reasons, skew the argument in their favour. I introduce the concept of a ‘virtue‐calibrated situation’, and argue that if the person–situation debate is to move forward in philosophy as it has in psychology, it must focus on such situations. I bring to bear evidence from analytic and continental philosophy, as well as from social and personality psychology.

THE PERSON–SITUATION DEBATE: IMPLICATIONS FOR MILITARY LEADERSHIP AND CIVILIAN–MILITARY RELATIONS

The so-called person–situation debate in psychology, which pits internal, personality-based explanations of behavior against external, environment or situation-based explanations seems headed for a resolution that will somehow include elements of both perspectives. These two alternative views of human behavior have also been applied to that subset of human behavior thought of as leadership, and in this domain a rapprochement also seems well underway. In the domain of ethical leadership, however, especially as applied to military misconduct, public discussion of such events is dominated by strictly situation-based explanations, while institutional developments within the military are showing signs of integration, paralleling developments in the broader academic domain. The public discussion of such events thus lags behind the approach to ethical conduct in war taken by the military, which increasingly integrates personal and situational factors in the moral and ethical development of soldiers and leaders. Potential consequences of overreliance on situationist approaches to military ethics are discussed.

In favor of the synthetic resolution to the person–situation debate

This article has two aims. First, we review the person–situation debate and what we believe to be its central issues. We propose that one of the most central issues in the debate was consistency, and argue that recognizing different conceptions of consistency is essential for a resolution to the debate. Second, we describe a synthesis resolution that incorporates different types of consistency and takes into account the important contributions of both the trait and social–cognitive approaches to personality. We note several current lines of research following from the synthesis, several of which are represented in the current special issue.