INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

The management of people would be much easier if everyone were the same, but they are, of course, different because of their ability, intelligence, personality, background and culture (the environment in which they were brought up), as discussed below. Gender, race and disability are additional factors to be taken into account. Importantly, the needs and wants of individuals will also differ, often fundamentally, and this affects their motivation, as described in the next chapter.

The headings under which personal characteristics can vary have been classified by Mischel (1981) as follows:

● competencies – abilities and skills; 

● constructs – the conceptual framework which governs how people perceive their environment; 

● expectations – what people have learned to expect about their own and others’ behaviour; 

● values – what people believe to be important; 

● self-regulatory plans – the goals people set themselves and the plans they make to achieve them.

Environmental or situational variables include the type of work individuals carry out; the culture, climate and management style in the organization, the social group within which individuals work; and the ‘reference groups‘ that individuals use for comparative purposes (eg comparing conditions of work between one category of employee and another).

Ability

Ability is the quality that makes an action possible. Abilities have been analysed by Burt (1954) and Vernon (1961). They classified them into two major groups:

● V:ed – standing for verbal, numerical, memory and reasoning abilities; 

● K:m – standing for spatial and mechanical abilities, as well as perceptual (memory) and motor skills relating to physical operations such as eye/hand coordination and mental dexterity.

They also suggested that overriding these abilities there is a ‘g’ or general intelligence factor which accounts for most variations in performance. 

Alternative classifications have been produced by

● Thurstone (1940) – spatial ability, perceptual speed, numerical ability, verbal meaning, memory, verbal fluency and inductive reasoning; 

● Gagne (1977) – intellectual skills, cognitive (understanding and learning) skills, verbal and motor skills; 

● Argyle (1989) – judgement, creativity and social skills.