This started off as a joke.
We have a session in office when some of us gather together to discuss concepts and chapters from a book on Organizational Behavior (Fred Luthans' if you want to know!).
Today the topic was Personality.
Now it is believed that personality is the factor for behavior, but the fact remains that research has almost never found how much of behavior is influenced by personality and how much by the situation or the context.
So I pronounced, "The atomic unit of organizational behavior is the individual's behavior, and you can never know with any degree of certainity both the personality or the situation behind the behavior"
But on a serious note, I think that personality is a western construct. In India the focus is on role of a person with regard to time and context. I don't know of any Indian word that is a direct translation of "personality", although there are words that are the equivalents of self, identity and ego.
Gautam, I wonder if the nearest word to personality in India is the word DHARMA. In the context of the Bhagawad Gita, dharma is that which represents the absolute core function or quality of anything. It is therefore, the dharma of a flower to spread fragrance.
ReplyDeleteFrom a western perspective, personality would be something under the control of the individual, but the indian DHARMA doesnt seem to lend itself to such dynamism!
What say?
I think we have a hindi word called vyaktitva which has its root in vayakti:person.
ReplyDeleteOn the cultural perspective although we have been a collective society,but individual excelllence and social behaviour was always a debated topic.
If you refer to the talks between Krishna and Arjun I think that has the best insights on OB and individual behaviour in group.