A portfolio of working in business

A portfolio of working in business In this portfolio, I will reflect on what I have learnt and experiences while I am undertaking BSB124, which is Working in Business. I will also look at the area that I would like to improve. I will do this in three sections. First section is about intrapersonal effectiveness and The Big Five Model will be explore and discuss how it assist me for my future career. Second section is interpersonal effectiveness, Belbins Self-Perception Inventory (1981) and SPARK will be discussed. The last section is about organizational effectiveness and networking and mentoring will be discussed. In these three sections, I will explore my own strength and weaknesses. 2. Intrapersonal effectiveness 2.1 The Big Five Model (NEO IPIP) Personalities at work are like cars in the city: They often can keep us from our destination. Pierce J. Howard, The Owners Manual for Personality at Work, 2001. Personality assessment is important in a variety of ways, from education to our future work. Psychologists have found a lot of methods which we can found on the internet or any other places to classify our personality dimension; however, The Big Five Model (BFI) is the one stands out as the most statistically robust. The Big Five Model has five factors which include extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability (or neuroticism) and openness to experience (Costa McCrae, 1992). Extraversion characterizes people who are outgoing, talkative, sociable and assertive; agreeableness characterizes people who are courteous, good-natured, empathic and caring; conscientiousness characterized people who are careful, dependable and self-disciplined; neuroticism characterized people who are anxious, hostile and depressed; and lastly openness to experience characterized people who are imaginative, creative, curious and sensitive (McShane, 2010, p.51). This research is very imp ortant to me because I aim to work as a hairdresser after I graduate from QUT and the Big Five Model can help me to have a better understanding of my own personality and therefore can improve my weaknesses. From the result that I get from the Big Five Model, as refers to the appendix 1, it has shows that I am low neuroticism, agreeableness and openness to experience. This has mean that I am calm, appetite for new ideas and can easily accommodate the wishes and needs of others but I will easily get bored for everything and easily unaware of problem. I personally think that the result is fairly accurate because as what I had experience at the past in BSB124, I found that I can easily accommodate my group members when we have meeting, for example, anytime will do for me to meet them to discuss the assignment we have, however, I will easily felt bored when we met up and will easily unaware some of the problem that my group members have. Therefore, from the Big Five Model, I can explore my intrapersonal strength and weaknesses and this will help in my future work which is hairdresser. From the result I get from the Big Five Model, agreeableness and openness to experience are my intrapersonal strength because as a hairdresser, you must be creative enough to design the hair style and you must also accommodate to your company culture. In fact, not only hairdresser requires agreeableness, most of the jobs also require you to have this personality. However, low neuroticism is my intrapersonal weaknesses. Why? This is because it has a big impact to my future career of hairdresser. As a hairdresser, it requires you to always aware the problem that the customers have. But, according to Costa McCrae (1999), low neuroticism means that insensitive or unaware of problems. This is a big issue because if I am unaware what the customers problem, then I would not be able to become a professional hairdresser. Therefore, I aim to imp rove the weakness that I have to ensure that I can develop my career goals. How am I going to improve my weakness which is low neuroticism? In our next group assignment, I will try to pay more attention to my group members and see whether they need help or not. I will spare no effort to help them. This is one of the opportunities that I can improve my neuroticism. Another opportunity is keep a diary to see whether my weakness got improve or not. 3. Interpersonal effectiveness 3.1 Belbins Self-Perception Inventory Firstly, what is a team? A team is a group of people who work together interdependently to accomplish a goals. Then, what make a good team? According to Belbins self-perception inventory (BTRSPI), a good team must include several important mixes which are plant, resource investigator, co-coordinator, shaper, monitor evaluator, team worker, completer finisher and implementer. These can identifies which roles are you in and therefore you can use the information to know your contribution and weakness. From the result that I get from the BTRSPI, as refers to the appendix 2, it shows that team worker is the best respondent team role for me and resource investigator is the second highest scores which mean that it can be denote as my back-up team roles. The strength of team worker is about helping individual members to achieve and maintain team effectiveness, however, team worker always indecisiveness at moment of crisis. While the strength of resource investigator is exploring new resources, but it liable to lose interest once the initial fascination has passed. The results are somehow accurate but do have a little bit inaccurate. By comparing the result to the previous section, they actually have a little bit of relevance. For example, from the previous section, the result from the Big Five Model shows that I will easily get bored for everything and resource investigator is liable to lose interest. This is very accurate because I do easily get bored and lose interest once the initia l fascination has passed. The reason I feel that this is a little bit inaccurate is because from my opinion, I am not good at helping individual members to achieve and maintain team effectiveness as what team worker state. Therefore, what I think is either this is my strength that I havent discovered yet or the result is a little bit inaccurate. 3.2 SPARK According to SPARK (2010, para.2) group projects arent fair is a frequent student response in higher education. What is SPARK? SPARK (self and peer assessment resource kit) is a tools that enables students to rate their own and their peers contributions. It will then automatically produce two factors which are the self and peer assessment (SPA) and the self assessment to peer assessment (SAPA). According to Spark (2010, para.7), SPA is a weighing factor determined by both the self and peer rating of a students contribution while SAPA is about the ratio of a students own rating of themselves compared to the average rating of their contribution by their peers. My overall SPA is 0.91 and my SAPA is 0.99. 0.91 of SPA is very low which mean that I did not contribute well in my group. This may due to because I did not aware the problem and maybe because I am English second language (ESL) students, therefore they gave me some easy job to do and thus I did not contribute much to the group. As my SAPA score is 0.99, it is slightly lower than 1, but still consider that I rated myself fairly accurate compared to the average rating that I received from my group members. Even though my SPA is low, but the feedbacks from my peers are still positive. For example, Good energy good to work with shows that I can easily accommodate to my group (this result is accurate by compared it to section 2.1); Huey was organized and cooperative throughout the group process. Even though English was not his first language, he successfully communicated ideas and gave a confident oral presentation which effectively conveyed his efforts in developing our presentations re commendations. (Once again, this had shows that agreeableness is my intrapersonal strength.) In my group, most of my group members came from other country, for instance, England, Malaysia and etc. Therefore, we all got a very different cultural background. However, since most of them are good in English, only I am the only one who is English second language (ESL) student, the problems occur when we need to discuss something and provide some new idea because I am poor at communicate by using English. Luckily, my group members are awesome. They help me a lot to finish up the part that I need to do. Therefore, I personally rate them all on SPARK higher than me. I have learnt a lot from the group. One thing that I have learnt from this group is respect. Why I say so? This is because they never discriminate against me even though I am ESL student and they respect me and will ask me what my opinion or ask me to decide something. However, according to Belbins model, I am poor at indecisiveness at moment of crisis. Therefore, most of the times I just ask them to decide. Thus, I learnt respect in this experience and I found that I need to improve my weakness (that is deciding on something and improve my English). As our group is multicultural group, this experience will help me for my career goals because as a hairdresser, you will come across with any type of customer and team members. Thus, I aim to improve my weakness to develop my career goals. 4. Organisational effectiveness 4.1 Networking and Mentoring What is networking? It is actually a system that sharing information and services among individuals or groups. Then why is networking important to everyone? According to Tamowska Singleton (2010), networking can be key to both personal and professional growth, but you have to be diligent about keeping in touch with your contacts and sharing information. There are four types of networking style, which are the loner, the socialiser, the user and the builder. The loner likes to do most things by themselves but they will not worry about other. The socialiser always tries to make friend with everyone they meet but they are not a good listener. The user tends to be collecting the business cards but they will not contact them again while the builder always listens and learns from other people carefully. According to Singleton, Networking is worth Millions. As I am first year business student, I did not have much experience about networking. Therefore, I aim to increase my networking experience by joining the student associations such as Business Advantage at QUT. Thus, I can build up a network with students, colleagues and also professionals before I graduate. What I will do is then keep in touch with them (not like user who just collect the business cards but didnt contact anymore but is the builder who will keep in touch with them and listen to them). This will affect my career as previous stated because as the builder, what am I suppose to do is always listen to the customer and learn new stuff from other people because customer like the hairdresser listen to them. When the hairdresser listen to the customer, they build a network between them and therefore the customer will go back to find the hairdresser again. That why networking is so important for my career. Then what is mentoring? According to Dessler, Griffiths Lloyd-Walker (2004), mentoring involves linking a more experienced member of staff with a less experienced member of staff to enable sharing of experience, knowledge and skills. Mentoring is a very powerful tool that we can share our skills and knowledge to each other, for example, as what I experience in BSB124, my tutor share her experience and her knowledge to me. Mentoring also important for my career because when I graduate and looking for a job, let say I am junior hairdresser, then I will need to find an experience senior hairdresser to share their experience to me therefore I can do the job better. To get mentoring success, I plan to meet my mentor at least every week to share our new knowledge or skills or experience. 5. Conclusion As the conclusion, I have reflected on what I have learnt and experiences while I am undertaking BSB124. In section 2 which is intrapersonal effectiveness, I aim to increase my neuroticism and I had plan on how to improve it. In section 3 which is interpersonal effectiveness, the Belbins model had stated me that I am always indecisiveness at moment of crisis. Therefore I also aim to improve the weakness that I had explored in section 3. Finally, in section 4, I would like to be the builder and I do have some plan to build up my network.

Implicit cognition Essay

Implicit cognition refers to internal influences that affect an individual’s behaviours. The identifying feature of implicit cognition is that an individual’s past experiences can influence their judgements in   fashion that the individual is not introspectively aware of – i.e. the person is not conscious of the fact that the experiences have affected his/her perceptions in such a way. (Greenwald & Banaji, pg 4; 1995) Evidence supports the view that social behaviour and attitudes in particular are often based largely on unconscious attitudes, for example an individual’s attitudes towards a specific ethnic group are prone to be implicitly influenced. Implicit attitudes are commonly thought to mainly effect cognitive bias in a negative way (e.g. racism), however Edward Thorndike (1920) named the ‘halo effect’, upon observing that personality ratings showed a tendency for positive attributes to be associated with other positive attributes more than they should be (Greenwald & Banaji, pg 9; 1995). A great amount of ‘halo effect’ research has been based on using physical attractiveness as the objectively irrelevant attribute that influences perception of other characteristics. Studies have shown that attractive people are judged to possess greater social skills as well as being more successful in employment (Dion, Berscheid & Walster; 1972). As previously mentioned implicit cognition is caused by past experiences influencing judgement in ways that the individual is not introspectively aware, thus it is imperative to use indirect measures to gauge an individual’s implicit attitudes. The distinction between direct and indirect measures depends on the relationship between what the subject is informed about the purpose of a measure and what the researcher chooses to interpret from the subject’s response to the measure (Greenwald & Banaji, pg 8; 1995) – the researcher will inform the subject that one attribute is being measured when in fact the researcher will interpret information about another attribute based on the subjects response to the measure. It is necessary to use indirect measures because implicit attitudes are by definition attitudes that an individual is unable to report as they are unaware of their existence i.e. implicit attitudes are beyond an individual’s introspective limits. For the purpose of this essay I have chosen to examine the reaction time based ‘Implicit Association Test’ (IAT) and Facial Electromyography (fEMG) which is based on physiological measurement. Implicit attitudes result in projections of behaviour or judgments that are under the control of automatically activated evaluation, without the actor’s awareness of that causation. The IAT procedure seeks to measure implicit attitudes by measuring their underlying automatic evaluation. A beneficial property of the IAT is that it may resist individuals masking their attitudes using self presentation strategies (e.g. providing false responses in order to gain social acceptance or avoid criticism). In short, the IAT may reveal attitudes and other automatic associations even or those who prefer not to express those attitudes (Greenwald et al, pg 1464-5; 1998). The IAT is performed over a series of five stages; the first stage is called ‘Target Concept Discrimination’ in this stage the target concept is introduced and the subject is instructed to simply pair the stimuli with its corresponding concept, for example a study on implicit attitudes towards sexual preference (Project Implicit – an online database of IATs offering the test to the public, spearheaded by Dr Anthony Greenwald, Dr Brian Nosek and Dr Maharin Banaji) presents the subject with the task concepts ‘gay’ and ‘straight’, the subject is then presented with images displaying gay or straight couples or words such as homosexual and heterosexual. When the stimulus appears on screen the subject pairs it with the corresponding category – picture of a man and wife pairs with straight concept. The next stage in the IAT is ‘Associated Attribute Discrimination’ as previously this stage is presented as a two- category discrimination task. The subject is asked to pair words such as happiness, love, agony, strife with the corresponding attributes good and bad according to which attribute best suits their meaning. Following the introduction to the ‘Target Concept Discrimination’ and to the ‘Associates Attribute Dimension’, the two are amalgamated in the third stage –i.e. gay and good on one side of the screen and straight and bad on the other or vice versa. During this stage stimuli for target and attribute discriminations appear on alternate trials. For example’ a picture of a homosexual couple would be shown followed by the word ‘famine’.   As previously the subject pairs the stimuli with their matching category. The fourth stage consists of reversing the target concepts position in the experiment and the final stage of the experiment combines the ‘Reversed Target Concept Discrimination’ with attribute discrimination. For example the gay concept is now on the same side of the screen as bad. The subject is then presented with alternating stimuli and pairs them with the appropriate concept or attribute. If the target concepts are differentially associated with the attribute dimension, the subject should find one of the combined task (either the third stage or the fifth stage) to be more difficult than the other- this is shown in the subjects reaction time; longer reaction times suggest the subject has higher difficulty pairing an attribute with a concept. The measure of the difference in difficulty is used to provide the measure of implicit attitudinal difference between the target categories (Greenwald et al, pg 1465-6; 1998). In the example of implicit attitudes towards sexual preference, it should be easier to complete the task when straight is combined with good if there is a stronger association between heterosexuals and good meanings than between homosexuals and good meaning, thus showing an implicit attitude of bias towards heterosexuals. Also it is common to use training stages before each of the combined discrimination stages to reduce the effects the order of the combined discrimination tasks has on the IAT results. Since the IAT was first described by Dr. Anthony Greenwald et al in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1998 it has grown exponentially in popularity, having been used in over 300 published studies and cited in over 800 articles (Azar, 2008). Among the reasons for the success of the IAT are its relative ease of use, the large effect sizes it creates, its high level of adaptability and its resistance to subject’s faking their responses. To show the validity of the IAT Greenway et al (1998) used the classical known-groups validity measure. This measure consists of using groups whom are known previous to the experiment to differ regarding the construct of interest. Greenwald et al used Americans of Korean and Japanese descent to test the validity of the IAT. The participants had to classify positive and negative words along with typical Korean and Japanese names in the combined discrimination stage, as expected the IAT results showed that individuals of Korean or Japanese descent were prone to hold mutually negative implicit attitudes towards the other ethnicity (Banse et al pg 146; 2001). It has been disputed that the reason for these IAT results is at least partially based on ethnic groups being more familiar with names associated with in their own group, i.e. positive IAT scores may reflect familiarity more so than sympathy with their own ethnic group. Another commonly expressed concern with the internal validity of the IAT is the order in which the combined discrimination tasks appear. Greenwald et al (1998) expressed that all other thing being equal, strengths of associations used in the first of the IAT’s two combined tasks had a tendency to be stronger than those used in the second combined task. However, in a subsequent study Nosek et al (2005) showed that an increase in the length of the training stages before each of the combined discrimination stages can result the order having less of an effect on the IAT scores. If the pairing order effect is due to the interference caused by learning and becoming accustomed to an initial response set and subsequently needing to replace it with a new response set, then extra practice with the new response set may act to reduce this effect. (Nosek et al, pg 177; 2005). Furthermore the IAT is designed that the order of the combined discrimination task be random.

Lily Monteverde - 1248 Words

Popcorn and Faith : The â€Å"ticket† towards success! Life is never way too easy to Lily Yu to start with. She came from a Chinese family and born in Manila, Her father is a copra magnate and her mother is a house wife, she had 12 sibling and they were all provided with their needs. They also have a place of their own to call â€Å"home† that shelters them which Psychologist Abraham Maslow theorized the basic human needs by suggesting that individuals are motivated to fulfill basic physiological and psychological needs The earliest memory that she had that struck her childhood years was during World War-II where she experienced what it was like not have anything to eat day after day, not to have any food is the worst feeling†¦show more content†¦It s not always that she is written about in a flattering light, and one thing is certain - in the history of Philippine cinema, Mother Lily is a legend in her own right! Her reputation precedes her and no matter what, many people would think they owe their lives t o her. Today, she is among the very few who has continued to produce movies even if sometimes her films fail to break even at the box-office, because according to her, filmmaking is her passion and mission in life. The things that she achieved without the help of anybody aside from her husband gave rise to the development of her self-esteem. Now she is ready to reach self-actualization after surpassing all the stages of the hierarchy of needs presented by Abraham Maslow. Acceptance of self, others, is the nature of Mother Lily Monteverde that helped her reached self-actualization. She is not ashamed or guilty about her human nature, with the short comings of her life, imperfections, frailties, and weaknesses. As of today is a successful producer, mother of Roselle and Meme, and her only son Dondon and a loving wife to Remy Monteverde, being a mother, love and devotion important. â€Å"Husbands and wives, they have differences but the most important is the family, the children, Monteverde said. She succeeded as a movie producer because she is very focused in anything she does. As a self-actualized person she learned to

Psychological Egoism - 662 Words

Psychological egoism is the view that everyone always acts selfishly. It describes human nature as being wholly self-centered and self-motivated. Psychological egoism is different from ethical egoism in their â€Å"direction of fit† to the world. Psychological ego-ism is a factual theory. It aims to fit the world. In the world is not how psychological ego-ism says it is because someone acts unselfishly, then something is wrong with psycho-logical egoism. In my opinion this argument is completely wrong and unsound. According to James Rachel, an author of â€Å"Elements of Moral Philosophy,† there two main arguments exist against psychological egoism. The first argument can be formulated as such: 1) Everyone always does what they most want to†¦show more content†¦Rachels p. 74) One can conclude from this that it is the object of the want that should be considered when determining the selfishness of an act. The second argument for psychological egoism is formulated like this: 1) Everyone always does what they most want to do. 2) If are does what one wants to do, ones gets satisfaction. 3) If one gets satisfaction from doing what they want to do, then satisfaction is one’s only goal 4) If satisfaction is one’s only goal, one acts selfishly. 5) Everyone always acts selfishly. The major criticism of this argument lays in premise three, its â€Å"factual premise† as James Rachel calls it in his book. Opponents of this argument and Rachel being one of them, imply that it is wrong to say that satisfaction is one’s only goal because satisfaction doesn’t even have to be a goal. Satisfaction is the presumable state that results from ob-taining a goal. Thus premise three is wrong. One can say that you can make satisfaction your goal if you will feel bad if you don’t do something, but this is not always the case. Satisfaction can result from something else. And it is also incorrect to say that one makes satisfaction his goal then chooses his desires to fulfill the satisfaction. (J. Rachels p. 82) The second criticism is in premise four. Rachels proposes to change the premise, making it less problematic by saying that satisfaction is â€Å"ones’ primary goal† instead of â€Å"one’ s only goal.†Show MoreRelatedPsychological Egoism : The Definition Of Psychological Egoism1178 Words   |  5 PagesPsychological egoism is the belief that a person’s actions are prompted by their own selfishness. If every action in the world was done, only to fulfill one’s own selfish aspirations, then there would be no purely altruistic deeds. Moral egoism is the belief that people should do what is in their best self-interest; however, they have a tendency to carry out actions due to their genuineness. Based on its definition, morality is doing something because it is the â€Å"right† thing to do. 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