Personality in the Workplace

Personality influences every aspect of our behaviour. Nowhere is this more true than in the workplace. From childhood to retirement, personality helps determine how we relate to others, how we approach our work, the level of our motivation, our ambitions and life goals, and our response to rules and regulations. Effective management, effective teaching, effective leadership all depend crucially upon our understanding of personality in others and in ourselves. Personality in the Workplace covers all aspects of personality assessment, personality development, and personality growth and change in a wide range of working environments, from the classroom to the office. Drawing upon extensive research findings and the author's personal experience as a leading psychologist, it discusses the major psychological theories of personality and goes on to examine how to get the best out of people, how to respond to their individual differences, how to understand the ways in which groups influence their members, how to recognise and respond to anxiety and to other inhibiting factors in people, and how to recognise serious personality problems. With its practical approach and easy jargon-free style, the book will be immediately accessible to students of organisational psychology and education, and will prove of great help to educators, to business people, to professional men and women, and to all those who have responsibility for the performance and wellbeing of others. David Fontana is currently Visiting Professor at the University of Algarve, Portugal, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Cardiff University and Visiting Professor at Liverpool John Moores University. He is an educational and counselling psychologist with an extensive knowledge of personality in educational and occupational contexts. Among his many books, which together have been translated into 25 languages, are Managing Stress, Managing Time, Social Skills at Work, Psychology for Teachers and Managing Classroom Behaviour.