HRMT19023 - Assessment 1: User Manual, Strategies, Justification

This assignment analyzes the results of self-assessment tools, including MBTI, conflict style, persuasion skills, and interpersonal communication, to create a 'User Manual'. The manual outlines the student's personality traits (identified as INFP or mediator), work approaches, and specific strategies a manager could employ to maximize their performance. Strategies include providing flexibility, democratic work culture, tasks of increasing difficulty, allowing self-paced work, offering motivation and inspirational tasks, and facilitating training in areas of weakness. A 1000-word justification supports these strategies with research, emphasizing the importance of understanding employee personality for effective management. The justification explains the rationale behind the selected strategies, linking them to the student's personality type and the broader literature on workplace dynamics, employee motivation, and training. The document highlights the need for managers to adapt their approach based on individual employee profiles to achieve optimal performance and job satisfaction.

Running head: JUSTIFICATION
Justification
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

1JUSTIFICATION
Introduction
The MBTI test categorizes people into sixteen types of personalities depending on
their most prominent qualities (Bal & Jansen, 2016). Through my weekly test I determined by
personality to be INFP (Introversion, Intuition, Feeling and perceiving) or a mediator. My
other tests too, informed me about my conflict and persuasion style along with my
interpersonal competencies. Depending on them, I have developed a user manual that informs
the best strategies to ensure best performance from me. This is a justification for those chosen
strategies and the impact that they will have on me depending on my personality types and
other skills.
Discussion
Specific aspects of my personality and approaches to work
The week one test of communication skills inventory analysis informed me that I lack
quite a bit in interpersonal communication. Specifically, my strength that I found through the
test was my active listening power, I lag behind in expressing myself, understanding the
emotional aspects of communication and might need more flexibility in feedback process. In
the week 2 persuasion skill indicates that I am highly effective in persuasion techniques with
some room for improvement. My strengths in this test was authority, and areas of
improvement were social proof and scarcity while liking, reciprocity and consistency were
my weaknesses.
The week 3 tested my conflict management style, which shows that compromising
conflict style and avoiding conflict style are my strengths while competing, collaborating and
accommodating are my weaknesses, thus making me a balanced and diplomatic person. The

2JUSTIFICATION
week 4 MBTI personality test informs me that I am an INFP personality who is also known
as the mediator. Thus, I am an idealist and positivist person. I appear calm, reserved and shy
which informs why I might have scored low on my interpersonal skills. I am more guided by
principles and honor and intent rather reward and punishments. The INFPs are also
diplomatic and harmonious thus, supporting my conflict and persuasion style.
Specific strategies a manager could employ to maximize my performance
Depending on the results of the four tests, these are the strategies that a manager can
adopt to maximize my performance:
 Provide flexibility and democratic work culture to ensure that I get room to breathe.
 Giving me chance to voice my opinion and taking them into consideration for
decision making.
 Provide tasks with increasing difficulty to season me into the workload.
 Let me work through my own pace and principles.
 Provide motivation and give inspirational work.
 Providing me with direction and meaning of the task at hand.
 Providing me a balanced workload for a better work-life balance.
 Train me to handle data and facts better
 Providing me opportunities to apply my persuasion and conflict style depending upon
situations, as and when my approach would seem best.
 More teamwork to improve my interpersonal skills.
Justification
The main strategies that have been identified in the user manual is flexibility and
democracy. Flexibility and adaptability in a workplace and in managers are necessary for
most people nowadays, not only specific personality types. Most of the people enjoy working

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according to their own pace and style, without being told at every step, what to do and how to
do it (Henkel et al., 2019). For example, in a negotiation, different people would apply
different methods, while some might think that more reciprocal attitude will help them
someone might apply more authority. While both may lead to successful negotiation but the
results might be different. Manager’s must understand the strengths and weaknesses of the
people that he is working with and employ them as necessary.
Democracy in work has been much debated as the basis is built on the idea of a state.
Many argue that it is the key to tapping the human competencies in an organization while
other refute it as impractical. Democracy might work differently for others for some certain
types of personalities, especially those who are more visionaries and conceptual, democracy
might be the key to motivating them (Weinfurt, 2019). Motivating people is the key aspect of
a manager’s job and democracy can ensure that. Democracy ensures that my manager
incorporates my views and opinions into the decision making process which indicates that I
am a values employee of the organization and the work that I do is valuable. This is one of
the core requirements for my personality type.
Increasing the difficulty of work is also another strategy that managers can take to
settle people into the organizational work culture (Lim & Bentley, 2019). When people are
thrust into the highest level of difficulty, they might find it difficult to cope up with the work
pressure. This increases their stress level and dissatisfaction. When managers take a gradual
approach, it is likely that employees would get time to get accustomed with the work,
understand the organizational goals and objectives and adapt themselves to the demands of
the organization. This gradual approach is also effective in training people on job (Ober,
2018). Most of the organizations provide employee training and majority of that training
happens on job. As the trainees learn slowly, they are become much more able to master new

4JUSTIFICATION
skills and techniques and apply them as they become more experienced with it without the
accompanied work pressure.
According to Li et al., (2018), academic performance can be determined through
personality types. Depending on that view, personality type might also be able to inform the
kind of work one might be comfortable doing and the methods or approaches that they might
have. Being an INFP personality type, having a harmonious and balanced work load is
necessary for me. People of this personality like balance and value calm and ease (Murphy et
al., 2020). They will have much difficulty in working within an organization where
everything is chaos all the time. The manager needs to take these into account while driving
me for performance.
Finding meaning and knowing the value of work, is motivating factor for many
workers. For my personality type it is requisite that it is present. Being extremely focused on
values and principles, this type of personality are likely to driven more if they feel that the
work that they do are valuable and are essential part of the company’s success (Murphy et al.,
2017). They are visionaries and their contribution to the company’s vision ensure that they
are motivated to work better. This is one of the main principles and the manager that I work
with in future would get much better result if he ensures this.
As INFP personality types are mostly weak in confrontations, facts and figures, the
manager also need to provide necessary training to ensure that I become able to handle those
aspects of job (Han, 2018). Literature shows that proper training and skills development is
one of the most effective method of building employee morale and performance. Through
training, employees master new skills that they apply in their workforce. Training in
interpersonal communication is also necessary as many times people may develop abilities

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that remained untapped due to their introverted nature or lack of ability to express themselves
in front of others.
Conclusion
From the above discussion, it is evident that managers need to understand the
personality of the employees in order to drive them towards better performance. As the
personality types indicate the dominant qualities of an individual, conducting a personality
test of the employees and managing them according to that might become beneficial in the
long run. An employee who is extrovert and dominating may not need the kind of motivation
that an introvert and compromising person does. Taking this into account, managers should
ensure that they are well versed in driving performance according to personality of the
employees.

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References
Bal, P. M., & Jansen, P. G. (2016). Workplace flexibility across the lifespan. Research in
Personnel and Human Resources Management, 34, 43-99.
Han, M. H. (2018). On the Relationship between College Students’ Personality Types and
their Ego-Resilience & Self-Efficacy-Based on the MBTI Personality
Assessment. Indian Journal of Public Health Research & Development, 9(12), 2175-
2179.
Henkel, T. G., Haley, G., Bourdeau, D. T., & Marion, J. (2019). An Insight to Project
Manager Personality Traits Improving Team Project Outcomes. Graziadio Business
Review, 22(2), 1.
Li, X., Sardinas, R., Shih, P. C., & Camp, K. (2018). Influence of Introversion and
Extraversion Using MBTI Personality Model on Academic
Performance. International Journal of Information and Education Technology, 8(9).
Lim, S. L., & Bentley, P. J. (2019). All in good team: Optimising team personalities for
different dynamic problems and task types. In The 2018 Conference on Artificial Life:
A Hybrid of the European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL) and the International
Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (ALIFE) (pp. 153-160).
One Rogers Street, Cambridge, MA 02142-1209 USA journals-info@ mit. edu: MIT
Press.
Murphy, L., Eduljee, N. B., Croteau, K., & Parkman, S. (2017). Extraversion and introversion
personality type and preferred teaching and classroom participation: A pilot
study. Journal of Psychosocial Research, 12(2), 437-450.

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Murphy, L., Eduljee, N. B., Croteau, K., & Parkman, S. (2020). Relationship between
Personality Type and Preferred Teaching Methods for Undergraduate College
Students. International Journal of Research in Education and Science, 6(1), 100-109.
Ober, J. R. (2018). Differences in High-School Student Learning by Instruction Type and
MBTI Personality Type.
Weinfurt, K. P. (2019). Managing different intellectual personalities in scientific
teams. Journal of clinical and translational science, 3(2-3), 50-52.