Introduction There has been a lot of debate over the issue of whether human behaviours are determined largely by the situations they are in. Lewin’s formula of B = ƒ(PE), where the B term represents behaviour, ƒ function, P the person’s personality and E environment, shall be taken as the starting point of this essay. He asserted that human behaviour is a function of the person’s personality and the environment (Lewin, 1935, p. 79). Yet, despite his formula which proposes that human behaviour is jointly affected by both the person and the environment, Ross and Nisbett (1991) believe that Lewin’s ideas were primarily about the situation having a great effect on behaviour (p. 9). By expressing human behaviour as a function, Lewin stated that …show more content…
The Big Five model holds that there are five dimensions of personality: Extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. It is presumed that these five broad personality factors stand at the top of a hierarchy, while more specific personality traits and behaviours are at the lower levels of this hierarchy (McCrae & John, 1992, p. 190; Paunonen, 1998). These five personality factors are able to predict a significant number of behaviours (Paunonen, 1998; Paunonen, 2003; Paunonen & Ashton, 2001). Most notably, Kumar, Bakhshi and Rani (2009) discovered a positive correlation between Organisational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB) and extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience, and a negative correlation between neuroticism and OCB. OCB refers to acts which the person commits out of free will, are not a result of the formal or informal reward system, and has a significant impact on the organisation’s productivity (p. 73). The Big Five model appears to be correlated to many kinds of behaviour as well as OCB, and suggests that human behaviour is largely determined by