“The survey by OfficeTeam revealed that nearly half of senior managers believe employees are more competitive with each other today than they were 10 years ago” (BusinessNewsDaily, 2012). In the real business world, getting along with colleagues makes the work environment and workers more productive and enjoyable in today’s organizations. However, not all situations with colleagues are easily dealt with. The given article entitled, ‘Don’t compete with colleagues; Embrace them’ suggests embracing colleagues is a much better way than competing with colleagues. How do you embracing colleagues then? Susan Credle said in the given article by Bryant (2012),
“I would suggest that if you look at something and you have a better idea, that you generously give that idea to someone and make them better. Because if we all do that, we all win. The minute you’re the only good thing at this company, we’re done. So can you do it? Can you be that generous?”
As individual’s personality affects interpersonal relationships in organizations, this essay suggests that you should consider your own level of self- monitoring and personality traits to understand more about yourself and to accept your colleagues and co-workers. This essay introduces self-monitoring, highlights its characteristics, and explains how the self-monitoring related to relationship capital. I will provide my own result of MBTI to self-monitor myself as an example.
1. Self-monitoring
1.1 What is self-monitoring?
Personality is the individual’s characteristics which has a stable pattern or behaviour on ideas, objects or people (Samson& Daft, 2005). According to Barrick, Parks and Mount (2005), there is significant variance between personality and performance relationships that remains unaccounted for, and several analyses have shown this. It means there are variables which are individual differences or external situations that moderate the relationship