Discuss how individual personality differences affect the ways in which members of an organization ...

Stress is a very personal experience; therefore, personality plays a role in stress. Employees high on the personality dimension of neuroticism, or negative affectivity, tend to view themselves, their organizations, their jobs, and the people they work with in a negative manner. Employees high on negative affectivity tend to experience more stress than those low on negative affectivity.

Employees high on the Big Five dimension of extraversion, or positive affectivity, tend to be outgoing and enjoy interacting and socializing with other people. Extraverts are less likely to experience stress in jobs requiring frequent presentations or meeting with new people on a day-to-day basis.

Openness to experience, which captures the extent to which employees are daring and open to a wide range of experiences, is likely to affect the extent to which employees experience stress. For most people, taking risks and making frequent changes can be stressful. Nevertheless, it is likely that employees who are high on openness to experience may find risk taking and frequent change less stressful than those who are low on openness to experience.

Employees high on self-esteem are less likely to experience stress from challenging work assignments and are more likely to think they can deal effectively with sources of stress. The stress experiences of Type A employees often do not differ from those of Type B employees. Initially, researchers thought that Type A's would experience more stress than Type B's would; however, recent research suggests that only Type A's who are very hostile will experience high levels of stress.

A final example is locus of control. Employees with an internal locus of control may experience less stress than those with an external locus of control because they feel that they can influence what happens to them.