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Lesson 6
Personality and Qualities
The word ‘PERSONALITY’ comes from the Latin word ‘PERSONA’ which originally referred to
a mask worn by Roman actors to indicate someone else’s role. It implied a false appearance, a front,
facade and exterior, showy but deceptive. During the Roman period itself an interesting shift in the
meaning took place and personal came to mean the player himself, as an individual with distinct
attributes and appearance that is a person showing his overt behaviour from which one could find out
his personality. It signified the true character of the person rather than merely his appearance.

Personality has been defined by various thinkers, psychologists, sociologists and educationists in a
variety of ways. Gordon Allport in reviewing the literature on the history of the concept of personality
identified fifty different definitions of this term. Please don’t look so worried—I won’t bore you with
all these 50 definitions. These definitions fall into two classes, namely, those laying emphasis on mask
approach and those emphasising on the substance approach. At this stage it would be sufficient to know
that both these approaches relate to the behavioural pattern of an individual to his/her personality.
Now, what do we understand by a well adjusted personality. A review of the studies carried out
by Lawton Maslow, Kalish, and Hurlock, show that some of the important aspects of a well
adjusted personality are Intellectual effectiveness, Insight, Doing something about every
problem, Work and recreation, Responsibility, Security, stress tolerance, Builds up healthy
relationships, Social awareness, Humour, Decisiveness, Appropriate flexibility, Learns from
experience and is optimistic, unwavering and objective, Emotional control, Moral courage, &
Physical Health. We are looking for all these good qualities in an individual. Afterall we don’t
want to hire some one like Jerome K. Jerome who said “Work fascinates me. I could sit and
watch others doing it for hours.”
There are basically 4 major Factors which we feel are essential for an individual to possess. They
are :—

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1
(1) Factor Intelligence or (2) Factor Social Adjustment.
Organising.
(3) Factor Social Effectiveness. 4

3 (4) Factor Dynamic.

These factors are further sub-divided into 15 qualities. These qualities are :—
I. Under Factor Intelligence and organising we have
(a) Effective Intelligence
(b) Reasoning ability
(c) Organising ability, and
(d) Power of expression.
II. Under Factor social adjustment we have (a) Social Adaptability, (b) Co-operation, and (c) Sense
of Responsibility.
III. Under factor Social Effectiveness we have (a) Initiative, (b) Self-confidence, (c) Speed of
decision, (d) Ability to influence the group and (e) Liveliness.