Chapter 10: Situational and Personality Influences on Organizational Citizenship Behaviors: A CAPS Perspective

The mission of personality psychology is to account for the characteristic patterns of thoughts, emotions, behaviors and the psychological mechanisms that generate these thought patterns (Funder, 2001). There are two primary theoretical approaches to personality (Mischel & Shoda, 1998): Social-cognitive approach and the trait approach. The social-cognitive approach construes personality as a system of mediating units (e.g., encodings, expectancies, and goals) and psychological processes that interact with the situation in which an individual resides in the expression of personality. The second approach is the dispositional or trait theory approach to personality (Mischel & Shoda, 1998). This approach proposes the existence of broad, stable traits, factors or behavioral dispositions as its basic units. Its fundamental goal is to characterize individuals in terms of a comprehensive, but finite and preferably small, set of stable dispositions that remain relatively invariant across situations. These traits are distinctive for the individual and determine a wide range of important behaviors.