Management 13th Edition by John Schermerhorn,Daniel Bachrach

Exercise 12

LEARN ABOUT YOURSELF
Individuals blinded by ambition can end up sacrificing substance for superficiality, and even sacrificing right for wrong.
Keep Ambition on Your Side
W hen it comes to understanding people's behavior, their attitudes, and their professional interactions with others, one of the most important distinctions can be their level of ambition , which is the desire to succeed, accomplish things, and achieve high goals. Ambition shows up in personality as a sense of competitiveness and the urge to get better or to be the best at something.
We tend to think of ambition as a positive individual quality to be admired and developed. Scholar and consultant Ram Charan calls it a "personal differentiator" that separates "people who perform from those who don't." But, there's also a potential downside. Charan points out that individuals blinded by ambition can end up sacrificing substance for superficiality, and even sacrificing right for wrong.
Overly ambitious people may exaggerate their accomplishments to themselves and others. They also may try to do too much and end up accomplishing less than they would otherwise have accomplished. Ambitious people who lack integrity can also get trapped by corruption and misbehavior driven by ambition.

GET TO KNOW YOURSELF BETTER
Review the "personal differentiators" in the small box nearby. How do you score Can you say that your career ambition is backed with a sufficient set of personal traits and skills to make success a real possibility Ask others to comment on the ambition you display as you go about your daily activities. Write a short synopsis of two situations-one in which you showed ambition and one in which you did not.