Succeed or Fail? : Guidelines in Becoming the Best Employee

Open your eyes and look around the world in which we live. Can you see there are different kinds of people who take different kinds decisions in order to maximize their value?

There are many factors which directly or indirectly affect the decision making ability of people. The decisions we take may vary according to the personalities of the individuals. Generally, people define “Personality” as a healthy body appearance, which is indicated either by a V shaped body, physical fitness and the pleasant image. This is a misconception held by the general public in the society.Personality is a psychological characteristic that determines how a person responds to his or her environment. Feelings, attitudes, traits, mechanism and other specific qualities are examples for psychological characteristics which distinguishes one individual from another. For instance, following situation can be illustrated. A project manager in a certain company has been given a project in which he has made a mistake. Only he is aware of it. How they reacts to it depends on his/her personality. Sometimes he will try to find out the solution for it by himself or he will confess that he has made a mistake. It solely depends on the personality of the project manager.

Therefore, personality is an integral topic in a global context. Because in today’s world, rather limiting to educational qualifications, the competencies of the employee too are important. If an employee expects a career development, he has to have flexibility in his personality to face different situations with confidence. This will showcase that he is one of the most competitive employees in the organization. The employee may be a manager, CEO, trainee, clerk in the company who has the urge to develop his personality since the childhood. Personality is developed with the growth of a person as they pass the oral stage, anal stage, phallic stage, latency stage as well as genital stage to capture and shape their personality. At each and every stage, a person has to find solutions for the mental and physical problems he comes across. How a person reacts to the problems they face, shows their personality and it supports the constant growth of a person.

Personality is determined by factors such as genetic determinants, physiological determinants, psychological determinants, social determinants and cultural determinants.

1. Genetic Determinants imply how the personality is inherited from generations, such as from father to children.  Most of the times, people take decisions depending on their genes.
2. Physiological Determinants include health conditions, height, body shape and physical appearance of a person etc. Though people generally think physiological determinants are the only factors which affect personality, it is combination of all aforementioned determinants.
3. Psychological Determinants consists of the way how people think, their education, their rational thinking determine the personality of a person.
4. Social Determinants are the influences of the family members, habit and lifestyle of friends, sibling effects etc.
5. Cultural Determinants are the nature, beliefs and values of a particular culture. It can belong to one or more of the 168 different subcultures around the world.

Moreover, there are some personality traits which explain how to be an effective employee of an organization. When an employee faces different kinds of problems regularly, they always tend to interact with situations in which they are familiar with. Because their belief is that the risk in familiar situation would be minimal due to their prior experiences and knowledge regarding the situation. Yet, organizations always undergo environment changes. Therefore, employees should be able to take the risk of dealing with unfamiliar situations which will aid to gain competitive advantages. To accomplish this, an employee should minimize his dogmatism: the degree of rigidity he displays towards the unfamiliar situation.

Furthermore, there are Inner Directed and Other Directed employees in an organization. Inner Directed employees examine the features and the benefits of each decision and analyse this information to take the most favourable one out of them.  Other Directed employees prefer social environment and acceptance to take decisions. Those employees take decisions only according to socially accepted ways. But to be an effective employee, everyone should have both inner and other directed ways which help to take right decisions at the right time in socially accepted methods.

“Utilitarian influences”, reflected in individual’s attempts to comply with the expectations of others in order to obtain approval or disapproval (Bearden et al., 1989), shows how the employees conform to the wishes of others to obtain rewards or avoid punishment. The employees always try to maximize their fringe benefits, salary or wage and welfare benefits. But they will not be an effective employee only with the maximization of the benefits; employee should take the correct and the most accurate decision in an independent manner without the influences of other higher posts. That helps to be an effective employee and it assures a successful long run for the organization as well. The employee should not change their decision to take short term benefits.

Consequently, “Value Expressive Influences”, means that an employee making decisions while taking risks in order to become an effective employee in the industry. Thus the employee should be effective, but they should not take decisions to be a famous character or to show off an artificial effectiveness. Because the wrong decisions they would take will keep the organization under pressure and at risk. Every employee should make decisions based on his/her abilities and responsibilities, abilities and capability of the organization, the degree of the authority which the employee possess and by looking at self-strengths and weaknesses.

Employee susceptibility to interpersonal influences depicts how the employee tends to accept information of others as evidences about reality. The employees should not totally depend on the experts’ comments or on the information regarding a particular problem they faces. Employee should use his/her knowledge to examine information they received and it should be accurately proved. That is how an effective employee should work without totally depending on other information source which may lead to several misrepresentations of the problems.

Employers may use a computer monitoring system such as Workpuls to provide proactive reaction, data security, data gathering, and overall system health to assess the employees’ efficiency.
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In conclusion, the employee may fail or not depending on the personality traits which the employee has to interact with each situation. It should be considered as one factor to be an effective employee within the organization. An employee should not take decisions totally depending on the inner feelings like willing to take risks and his/her lifestyle. It should have a concern on the situational factors, his/her abilities, past experiences and expert’s knowledge. Thus, these causes may lead to build a brand personality of him/her within the organization or in the industry both locally and probably global.

ReferenceBearden, W. O., Netemeyer, R. G., & Teel, J. E. (1989). Measurement of consumer susceptibility to interpersonal influence. The Journal of Consumer Research, 15, 473–481.

Amila’s Bio – In Brief

I am Amila K Sampath from Marketing Department of University of Kelaniya at the 3rd Year of bachelor of business management degree program. I schooled at Ananda Collage Colombo 10. From the school time I am participating for different literary activities and drive the life towards to the happiness as a leisure time activity. With the continuity of school time mode I try to take the advantage of the university life and my personal life. I want to say “change the style of the works which will be admired by them”. In my life, as a must I have targets and full of dedication to become an achiever. So, if you call me as an achiever that is a suitable nick name for me. I hope to see my maximum output after 10 years from now as a good Marketer. Nerdynaut is a good opportunity to the all interested parties to collect most value added information in a trusted manner. Because all the articles are selected through the judge panel and the Nerdynaut tries to maximize the motivation of the article contributors with providing internationally recognized certificate. So, I would like to invite all the interested parties to gather with the Nerdynaut team and good luck for the Nerdynaut!