Case Analysis: Steve Jobs' Personality & Attitudes Drove His Success INTRODUCTION: Personality is the traits and behaviors that give a person his or her identity. The Big Five personality dimensions are used to illustrate traits such as extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience. Each of these dimensions can be used to assess job performance. Likewise, the five traits that are important in organizations include locus of control, self-efficacy, self-esteem, selfmonitoring, and emotional intelligence. These traits are important to managers who wish to understand the behaviors they see in the organization. Video Clip from New Steve Jobs Movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upcQJ_hDet8 Discuss the Steve Job’s formula for success. In what ways was he innovative and how did his attitude play a vital role in his career? Discuss how Jobs utilized his personality traits to influence others. Which personality trait do you most identify with and why? Required information Steve Jobs's Personality & Attitudes Drove His Success The Big Five personality dimensions are: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience. Extroversion refers to how outgoing, talkative, and sociable a person is. Agreeableness refers to how trusting and good natured one is. Conscientiousness refers to one's dependability, responsibility and achievement orientation. Emotional stability refers to how relaxed or unworried one is. Lastly, openness to experience indicates how intellectual, imaginative, curious, and broadminded one is. Each of these dimensions can be used to assess job performance. The five traits that are important to understand behavior in organizations include locus of control, self-efficacy, self-esteem, selfmonitoring, and emotional intelligence. Each of these factors contributes to an employee's job performance. These traits are important to managers who wish to understand the behaviors they see in the organization. Read the case below and answer the questions that follow. Walter Isaacson interviewed Steve Jobs as part of his work on writing Jobs's biography. Jobs had an interesting resume that included working for Atari in its early years, co-founding Apple in his parents' garage in 1976, being ousted as Apple's leader in 1985, a stint with Pixar Entertainment, returning to Apple in 1997 to not only rescue it from bankruptcy but to build it back to the world's most valuable company by the time he died in October of 2011. Jobs had a primary interest in building the best product and what the customer wanted, more than a focus on a lot of products and maximizing profits. For example, upon his return to the company in 1997 he reviewed the company's product line and decided to reduce its focus to simple consumer and pro products that were either desktop or portable. He decided to cancel all other product lines, relying on his belief that "Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do." He was a relentless perfectionist who lived out his belief about focusing on doing a few things well. After addressing Apple's problems, Jobs began taking his "top 100" people on a retreat each year. On the last day, he would stand in front of a whiteboard and ask, "What are the 10 things we should be doing next?". As ideas came up, he would write them down—and then cross off the ones he decreed dumb. After much jockeying, the group would come up with a list of 10. Then Jobs would slash the bottom seven and announce, "We can only do three." Jobs also believed that in order to succeed, the company had to think into the future. For example, after the iPod became a huge success, Jobs spent little time relishing it and instead began to worry about what might endanger it. One possibility was that mobile phone makers would start adding music players to their handsets. So he cannibalized iPod sales by creating the iPhone. "If we don't cannibalize ourselves, someone else will," he said. His personality was such that he drove people to accomplish the things they themselves would tell him were impossible. Colleagues called it his Reality Distortion Field, after an episode of Star Trek in which aliens create a convincing alternative reality through sheer mental force. An early example was when Jobs was on the night shift at Atari and pushed Steve Wosniak to create a game called Breakout. Wosniak said it would take months, but Jobs stared at him and insisted he could do it in four days. Wosniak knew that was impossible, but he ended up doing it. Jobs commented that "I've learned over the years that when you have really good people, you don't have to baby them," and that "By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things." Source: Excerpted from W. Isaacson, "The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs," Harvard Business Review, April 2012, pp. 93–100 ...
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