Intelligence And Personality - 1682 Words

Introduction It is commonly believed that people differ in various ways, and these individual differences play a detrimental role on their behaviour at work. To be more specific, individual differences include two kernel factors which refers to intelligence and personality. It is clear that individual differences are important in determining behaviour, however, there are other external factors which are equally important, such as working environment or culture within an organisation. Intelligence Gottfredson, (1997) stated that intelligence is ‘a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience.†¦show more content†¦On the contrary, those people who scored low on one kinds of ability test, were more likely to score badly on others as well. Meanwhile, Spearman also concluded that intelligence is a cognitive ability which could be measured and expressed numerically. The relationship between intelligence and work related outcomes has been found through various empirical studies. A longitudinal studies found that there is a positive moderate correlation (.51) between IQ at 12 years of age and occupational level and a slightly higher correlation (.53) between IQ at 12-year-old and income (.53) aged 40-50. (Judge, Higgins, Thoresen, Barrick, 1999) Thus, we can see that IQ level plays a significant role on work related outcomes from this empirical study. In addition, another study found that IQ level has a low correlation (.23) with performance within low complexity jobs whereas IQ has a strong correlation (.58) with performance in high complexity jobs. (Hunter Hunter, 1984; See Schmidt Hunter, 2004 for an overview) To put it another way, high intelligence is not essential for low complexity jobs, for example, waiter and cleaner does not require high IQ. On the contrary, high intelligence is crucial for complex jobs since it represents high reasoni ng and mental capabilities. Thus, it is not hard to see that individuals’ behaviour at work will be remarkably