Deck 2: Individual Differences: Personality and Ability

Question 1

Approximately 50 percent of the variation we observe in people's personalities can be attributed to genetic factors.

Answer 1

True

Question 2

A trait is a specific component of personality that describes a person's tendencies to feel, think, and act in certain ways.

Answer 2

True

Question 3

Managers should view employees' personalities as relatively fixed in the short run.

Answer 3

True

Question 4

Extraversion is characterized by negative emotions and stress over time and across situations.

Question 5

Over periods of time ranging from five to ten years, a person's personality is quite unstable.

Question 6

Both personality and situational factors affect organizational behavior.

Question 7

Constraints and pressures in the workplace do not affect a person's attitudes and behaviors on the job.

Question 8

Personality is the pattern of relatively enduring ways in which a person feels, thinks, and behaves.

Question 9

Most researchers agree that the traits that make up a person's personality cannot be categorized.

Question 10

A person's personality is really a collection of his or her abilities.

Question 11

A low measure of agreeableness might be an advantage in jobs that require a person to be somewhat antagonistic, such as bill collector or drill sergeant.

Question 12

Personality does not play a dominant role in predicting worker behavior on a highly structured automated manufacturing line.

Question 13

Researchers have identified the specific set of genes that a person is born with that determine personality.

Question 14

Ben Schneider suggests that the attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) framework can explain how personality can determine the nature of whole organizations.

Question 15

Personality is determined partially by nature (life experiences) and partially by nurture (biological heritage).

Question 16

Research has demonstrated that personality influences career choice and job satisfaction.

Question 17

Everyone has a specific type of personality.

Question 18

Neuroticism is a trait not generally possessed by psychologically healthy individuals.

Question 19

When situational pressures are weak, personality is not a good predictor of an employee's behavior.

Question 20

Extraversion is a personality trait that predisposes individuals to experience positive emotions.

Question 21

Individuals with an internal locus of control believe that their own actions or behaviors have an impact on what happens to them.

Question 22

Self-control is the extent to which people try to monitor the way they present themselves to others.

Question 23

Senior managers MOST OFTEN have a greater need for affiliation than for power.

Question 24

Deductive ability pertains to solving arithmetic problems and dealing with numbers.

Question 25

Self-promotion is the extent to which people have pride in themselves and their capabilities.

Question 26

Individuals with a high need for affiliation are often found in jobs that require a lot of social interaction.

Question 27

People who are low self-monitors are very concerned about what others think of their behavior.

Question 28

Type A employees make good team players.

Question 29

Individuals with an external locus of control require less supervision than do individuals with an internal locus of control.

Question 30

If a person with an external locus of control performs well, then he or she will attribute the performance to external factors, such as luck.

Question 31

High self-monitors perform well in jobs which require them to interact with different types of people on a regular basis.

Question 32

Type B employees are driven to get a lot done in a short period of time.

Question 33

High self-monitors want their behavior to be socially acceptable.

Question 34

For jobs that change frequently, require innovation, or involve considerable risk, individuals who are open to experience may have an advantage.

Question 35

Verbal ability is the ability to understand and use written and spoken language.

Question 36

Individuals with high self-esteem are more likely than individuals with low self-esteem to choose challenging careers and jobs.

Question 37

Agreeable individuals generally are easy to get along with and are team players.

Question 38

Individuals with a high need for achievement have a special desire to perform challenging tasks well and to meet their own personal standards for excellence.

Question 39

Low self-monitors are good at managing the impressions that others have of them.

Question 40

Individuals with a high need for power want to be liked by others.

Question 41

Nature is to genetics as nurture is to ________.

A) life experiences
B) personality
C) agreeableness
D) DNA

Question 42

________ is the pattern of relatively enduring ways that a person feels, thinks, and behaves.

A) Nature
B) Nurture
C) Ability
D) Personality

Question 43

A low level of emotional intelligence may actually impair performance.

Question 44

Which of the following BEST explains the significance of nurture and nature in the development of an individual's personality?

A) Neither nurture nor nature is necessary to the development of personality.
B) Only nurture has an impact on the development of an individual's personality.
C) Both nurture and nature impact the development of an individual's personality.
D) Only nature is necessary to the development of an individual's personality.

Question 45

Drug testing can assess how excessive fatigue or disease contributes to impaired performance.

Question 46

Emotional intelligence training begins with an accurate assessment of an employee's strengths and weaknesses.

Question 47

Behavior and feelings that are inherited from parents is MOST LIKELY a result of ________.

A) nature
B) biological forces
C) personality forces
D) nurture

Question 48

Managing ability by selection requires identifying tasks, identifying abilities needed to accomplish those tasks, and developing accurate measures of those abilities.

Question 49

Emotional intelligence is equivalent to cognitive ability.

Question 50

Training has not been found to be effective in increasing the emotional intelligence of employees.

Question 51

Spatial ability is the ability to determine the arrangement of objects in relation to one's own position.

Question 52

Perceptual ability is especially important to airplane pilots and professional photographers.

Question 53

Training is only used to enhance workers' skills beyond the minimum levels.

Question 54

Both cognitive ability and physical ability are determined by nature and nurture.

Question 55

Leaders and managers use emotional intelligence to relate to others and understand themselves.

Question 56

Which of the following statements BEST describes the development of personality?

A) An individual is born with a predetermined personality.
B) An individual is born with no personality.
C) Personality develops over time.
D) Very little is known about the development of personality.

Question 57

Verbal ability is especially important to teachers, writers, and lawyers.

Question 58

General intelligence is determined by the genes we inherit from our parents and by situational factors.

Question 59

If a researcher found identical twins, separated at birth, to be nearly identical in personality, what would he MOST LIKELY conclude?

A) Nature is more important than nuture in determining personality.
B) Nurture is more important than nature in determining personality.
C) Nature and nurture play equal roles in determining personality.
D) There are no conclusions that can be drawn from the research.

Question 60

Some standardized tests of cognitive ability have been criticized for being culturally biased.

Question 61

A specific component of personality that describes particular tendencies a person has to feel, think, and act in a certain way is ________.

A) a mood
B) an ability
C) a trait
D) a behavior

Question 62

Which of the following statements about the Big Five model of personality is TRUE?

A) A person will always have one trait in which they rank highest.
B) A person who ranks high on extraversion is likely to have many social interaction with others.
C) A person who ranks high on agreeableness will rank low on conscientiousness.
D) A person who ranks high in extraversion can rank high or low on any other trait.

Question 63

Personality is MOST LIKELY to play an important role in determining individual job performance when ________.

A) situational pressures are stronger
B) the supervisor is more outgoing
C) the employee is more outgoing
D) situational pressures are weaker

Question 64

Individuals likely to experience negative moods at work, feel stressed, and generally have a negative orientation toward the work situation are said to be ________.

A) unmotivated
B) pixilated
C) low on neuroticism
D) high on neuroticism

Question 65

The workplace behavior of an individual working on an assembly line with strict rules and regulations is MOST LIKELY influenced by ________.

A) the organizational situation
B) his or her personality
C) the role of nature
D) the role of nurture

Question 66

The process by which workers with similar personalities are attracted to and hired by organizations and those with dissimilar personalities leave is described by the ________.

A) situation-person debate
B) attraction-selection-attrition framework
C) hiring-retention-departure cycle
D) attraction-selection-augmentation process

Question 67

Dana is an attorney. She is a gifted legal thinker and writer. When her partners bring her a legal problem that they will need to address in court she is almost always able to help them. However, she refuses to go into court herself. She explains that she simply does not feel comfortable speaking publicly. In which trait does Dana MOST LIKELY rank low?

A) extraversion
B) agreeableness
C) conscientiousness
D) openness to experience

Question 68

Individuals who do not tend to experience negative emotions and are not as critical and pessimistic as others are ________.

A) low on negative affectivity
B) high on positive affectivity
C) high on extraversion
D) high on neuroticism

Question 69

Which one of the following is NOT one of the Big Five personality traits?

A) neuroticism
B) extraversion
C) interlocution
D) conscientiousness

Question 70

Neuroticism is a trait that ________.

A) is only found in neurotic individuals
B) is possessed by all normal, psychologically healthy individuals to a certain degree
C) reflects people's tendency to experience positive emotional states
D) is also referred to as positive affectivity

Question 71

Personality within an individual typically evolves ________.

A) over approximately 25 years
B) relatively quickly
C) when an individual changes jobs
D) at no point during a lifetime

Question 72

A manager wants to evaluate prospective employees' chances for success at a job in as fair of a way as possible. Which of the following factors should the manager consider?

A) both personality and situational factors
B) personality factors only
C) situational factors only
D) neither personality nor situational factors

Question 73

A manager hired many creative people. He notices that despite his requests, they are not contributing creative ideas or new ways of doing things. The BEST change the manager can make to fix this would be to ________.

A) make office procedures more flexible
B) restrict the number of vacation days taken
C) increase the specificity of the tasks given
D) better train employees in the company's policies

Question 74

Which statement is TRUE regarding personality in the workplace?

A) Personality greatly influences the work of all employees.
B) Personality has little influence on the work of employees.
C) The influence of personality depends upon the type of job one is doing.
D) There is very little research on the influence that personality exerts in the workplace.

Question 75

Which of the following dimensions of personality do anxiety, self-consciousness, and vulnerability fall under?

A) extraversion
B) neuroticism
C) conscientiousness
D) openness to experience

Question 76

In which work situation will personality MOST LIKELY play a role in job performance?

A) a grocery store where employees are given an overall goal but few guidelines on how to implement it
B) a fast food restaurant where there is a standard procedure for how to do everything from hand washing to what to say while taking an order
C) at a toy factory where workers must put parts together at a certain rate in a sequential order
D) at a call center where employees have a script with how to respond to customers

Question 77

When situational pressures are ________, personality is not a good predictor of on-the-job performance.

A) strong
B) weak
C) nonexistent
D) flexible

Question 78

Mark is a well-liked boss. He has a suggestion box outside his door and has implemented many of the suggestions, even some of the more reckless ideas, such as putting a ping pong table in the meeting room. Although the organization has many strict procedures, Mark does not follow them nor does he expect this of his employees. In which trait does Mark MOST LIKELY rank the lowest?

A) agreeableness
B) extraversion
C) conscientiousness
D) openness to experience

Question 79

The collection of traits that compose how a person generally tends to think, feel, and behave is called ________.

A) a mood
B) a personality
C) a gene
D) a behavior

Question 80

A company is looking to hire a person that will need to work with five others on a project. The open spot is due to an employee abruptly leaving. In her exit questionnaire, she wrote that the other team members were impossible. During the interview process, which question would BEST help the company find the best person for this position?

A) Do you like trying new things?
B) Are you a worrier?
C) Do you believe your actions affect your fate?
D) Do you have sympathetic feelings for others?