Assignment: Person-Situation Interaction

Assignment: Person-Situation Interaction

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Assignment: Person-Situation Interaction

There are six ways in which a person and the situation interact to shape a person’s goals, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

These are:

1. Different persons respond differently to the same situation.

2. Situations choose the person.

3. Persons choose the situation.

4. Different situations can prime different parts of the person.

5. Persons change the situation.

6. Situations change the person.

As part of your answer:

• Discuss what is meant by each of these dyads.
• Provide an example of how each one works.
• Assume you are a supervisor. How would you work within each of these situations with your employees to increase employee motivation? How would your decisions be affected by each person-situation dyad?
• Assume that you are an industrial/organizational consultant brought into the same office as asked to study these person-situation interactions in order to advise management how to best put them to use to increase employee motivation which research design would you use? Why is this design the best fit for this office situation?

The person–situation debate in personality psychology refers to the controversy concerning whether the person or the situation is more influential in determining a person’s behavior. Personality trait psychologists believe that people have consistent personalities that guide their behaviors across situations. Situationists, opponents of the trait approach, argue that people are not consistent enough from situation to situation to be characterized by broad personality traits.

Background[edit]

Interest in determining whether there were any generalities in behavior began in the 1920s and 30s.^[1] Gordon Allport and Henry Murray both supported the idea of a consistent personality with occasional situational influences.^[2] Allport noted that “traits become predictable to the extent that identities in stimulus situations are predictable.”^[3] Others like Edward Thorndike viewed behavior as a composition of responses an individual has to situations.^[1]

In 1968, Walter Mischel published a book called Personality and Assessment claiming that behavior is too cross-situationally inconsistent