Individuality: an Organization’s True Value Proposition
From the product to process to the customer, companies today are fierce-fully competing to maintain their place in the market. Products have turned into solutions where customers are no longer searching for the specs of the product alone but for the quality, friendliness of the staff, and even the stories behind the brands. Successful marketing campaigns have shifted their focus from promoting their products to promoting their value, and to deliver the value they must first understand “the people”. An understanding of psychology and what shapes and distinguishes humans from one another are equally important to managing the operations of the company. Flourishing businesses like Google and Apple have their success rooted in understanding and creating for the “people”. Whether the focus is on company culture and providing the best environment for their employees or on formulating the right customer-oriented strategy, it all comes down to one thing, “understanding the people”.
“Why are we different?”
Many studies and theories have tried to answer the question “Why are we different”. Understanding individuality and personal variation is a common topic of personality psychologists. The Encyclopedia of Social Psychology (Baumeister & Vohs, 2007) defines individual differences in terms of enduring psychological characteristics. Individual differences are the more-or-less enduring psychological characteristics that distinguish one person from another and thus help to define each person’s individuality. Among the most important kinds of individual differences are intelligence, personality traits, and values.*
Individual differences not only shape behavior and individual sense of self, but also, explain why individuals differ in traits such as skills, aptitudes, and abilities to learn and perform. The Sage Glossary of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Sullivan, 2009) has a definition of individual differences that are particularly geared toward learning. Learners may vary in their personalities, motivations, and attributions for their successes and failures when learning—all of which may affect how and why they learn.* Traits may differ according to their resistance to change, where some traits like effort and attributions of success and failure may be adaptive while gender, culture, and race are more stable.
*Jeanine M. Williamson, Teaching to Individual Differences in Science and Engineering Librarianship, 2018
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