Personality and Performance

by R Spillance & J Martin

UNSW Press, 2004

$49.95

It’s well known that the quality of managers can dramatically impact their teams’ retention, morale and productivity levels. However, managers’ abilities to do this can be hindered by the fact that they’re often promoted on their technical abilities, rather than their skills in managing employees. The good news is, this is changing.

The ability to effectively manage people requires a good understanding of both oneself and others. In Personality and Performance: Foundations for Managerial Psychology, Macquarie University academics Robert Spillane and John Martin argue that the purpose of psychology is to enable working people to gain insight into, and mastery of, themselves. This is at odds with the view that managers study psychology in order to better understand their colleagues’ personalities, and as a result, manage them more effectively.

Personality and Performance explores a number of areas, such as motivation, authoritarianism, social psychology and group dynamics. Each chapter examines schools of psychological thought, from Freud through to Pavlov’s dogs and Skinner’s pigeons.

Personality and Performance is an academic text, and as such, makes for heavy going at times. But pick and choose your chapters and it can make for enlightening reading.