An ideal image of a person is a combination of self-perception and the perspective of others who know him. Self-perception is not an objective process. It’s often distorted by the result of motivated cognition. This omission results in blind spots. Self-perception is biased by “motives such as the desire to maintain a positive self-concept; the desire to confirm one’s existing self-views, and the desire to enhance oneself” . Accuracy in self-knowledge is a topic of research for psychologists. The narrative psychologist believe that objective self-knowledge is not possible . Narrative Psychologists argue that people attach meanings to objects and feelings from their life experience. Hence, self-knowledge is very much subjective. Rather than looking into the subjective narration of one's life story, the psychologists look into the individual's approach towards attaching meaning to their life experience. This meaning is dynamic and subjective but they reveal important psychological outcome of an individual. There are two epistemological approach to make self-knowledge perspective close to accurate. The narrative approach tries to make it accurate by having "believable" stories. Paradigmatic approach attaches mathematical logic to put some objective conclusion to the individual's narration . However, both these approaches do not claim that self-knowledge is accurate. “Introspection” – the inwardly directed attention is thought to be an effective way of acquiring self-knowledge. But recent research suggests that many perspectives are hidden from our conscious self which reduces the effect of introspection in self-knowledge . Vazire also tries to answer the question on what is the accuracy level of Self-perception and other’s perception with respect to daily activities. People assume that there is nothing in their day to day life that is unknown to them and known to others. However, studies show that others have overlapping as well as unique insight about a person . The presence of blind spots is evidenced by the differences between one’s conscious, explicit and un-conscious implicit self-perception. An implicit self-perception is perhaps the most efficient prediction of one’s personality. But it comes out as self-motivated, conscious explicit perception. The implicit personality trait is not visible to the self when he is conscious. However, it comes out as the other’s perception about him. Hence, Blind spots negatively affect success factors, which hinders professional advancement. Oltmanns in his thesis, “Meta-perception for pathological personality traits: Do we know when others think that we are difficult?” examines self-perception, expected peer perception and peer reports. The self- evaluation of the person disagreed in great measure with the description provided in peer evaluation. So, there was a question of accuracy- Which score to consider; self or peer evaluation. Again, they evaluated the same set of people after four years. The result was interpreted as follows: The self -perception measures emphasized internalizing problems (subjective distress and self-harm) while the peer-report measure emphasized externalizing problems (especially antisocial personality features) . When they were considered together, the peer nomination scores were more effective than the self-report scales in predicting Profession success.
Personality has a direct impact in understanding employees’ behavior at work. Broadly personality can be categorized into a big five factor model, also known as FFM or OCEAN. The five factors are: Openness to Experience (Intellect), Conscientiousness (controlled emotional behavior), Extraversion (Talkative /Interactive), Agreeableness (Collaborative), and Neuroticism (Mental Stability). These five factors determine what kind of behavior will be exhibit by the person. These five personality traits can be again distinguished on the basis of their Observability (which is externally exhibited) and evaluativeness (if it can be evaluated quantitatively). Like Extraversion has high observability whereas Neuroticism has low observability. Vazire’s Self-Other Knowledge Asymmetries (SOKA) model shows that self-predictions are more accurate for traits with low evaluativeness (e.g., Extraversion, Neuroticism) than for traits with high evaluativeness (e.g., intellect). Whereas other’s predictions are more accurate for traits with high observability (e.g., Extraversion) than for traits with low observability (e.g. Neuroticism) .
A blind spot is a mindset or behavior that we consciously or unconsciously try to overlook. Common blind spots are exhibited against Personality (Perception of personality traits), Values (Attitude do not relate to the business values), Experience (Leadership blind spot that assumes that past results will result in future success), Strategy (revealing too little about the strategy) and Conflict (when conflict becomes a power struggle) . Personality blind spots exist as there are advantages and disadvantages of all the personality types but we tend to overemphasize the advantages. Personality blind spots are very hard to discover as we value our strengths more than downsize of the personality type. That’s where peer evaluation is effective as they are not biased on your personality trait. So, how to discover the personality blind spots? One highly used method is plotting the views, information or feelings of a person against the four quadrants of a JOHARI model window. The four quadrants in a JOHARI Window are: Arena – Known to self and others. This is the public behavior that we are proud to exhibit, Blind Spot – Unknown to Self and known to others. The blind spots are the habits, preferences, dislikes and the prejudices that are apparent to others but we don’t like to accept, Façade – Known to self but unknown to others. The secret wishes that we are reluctant to share with others. And unknown – Unknown to self as well as others . The overall aim of an individual would be to have more information in the first quadrant, the arena. This can happen in an open and supportive work environment where the manager seeks individual feedback and encourages peer evaluation. The fourth unknown quadrant information may not be needed at all. However, the third quadrant (façade) is also important. Once the blind spots are discovered, one needs to work on them individually and keep receiving feedback over a period on his development action points. The feedback can be received from his peers and his manager.
An organization as a whole should incorporate several social and emotional intelligence tests in their regular assessment. These assessments may help in revealing some blind spots. There are suggested ways to work against personality blind spots – Once the blind spots are identified they need to go back to history to confirm that these blind spots have actually hampered their professional development. They need to come out of the pattern that they were following before. Often working with executive coaches help people to train themselves. It’s to be kept in mind that not all capabilities can be learned. One has to find his dominant traits and the secondary traits. If there is a non-dominant trait that can’t be learned then he is a mismatch in his role. There is a teachable fit framework that can serve as a tool to map the blind spots against whether they important and if they are can they be taught . This is a way to find out talent mismatch and hence swap roles according to their most fit capabilities.
We have researched that Personality blind spots do exist and they hinder professional development. These blind spots can be revealed only when self-perception and other’s perceptions are correlated. There are traits that are predicted more accurately by others close to us. Self-perception may go wrong because of biasness that exist between our conscious and unconscious self. Studies negative the assumption that self-evaluation is the best way to evaluate oneself. All individuals tend to have blind spots. There are several ways to assess oneself on behavior traits that are not easily observable. These tools should be used to capture the whole image of a person. It’s proved that the personality blind spots have to be revealed before one can plan his development action plan.
Works Cited
Carlson, Erika N, Simine Vazire and Thomas F Oltmanns. "Self‐Other Knowledge Asymmetries in Personality Pathology." Journal of Personality (2013): 155-170. Document.
Coach, Tom. Overcoming Leadership Blind spots. 24 February 2014. Web. 3 April 2016.
Heyne, Felicitas. My Blind Spot - The Difference between Self-Awareness and External Perception. 8 March 2012. Document. 3 April 2016.
ManpowerGroup. Teachable Fit: A New Approach for Easing the Talent Mismatch. 2010. Web. 2 April 2016.
Oltmanns, Thomas F., et al. "Meta-perception for pathological personality traits: Do we know when others think that we are difficult?" Consciousness and cognition (2005): 739-751. Document.
Vazire, Simine and Erika N Carlson. "Others sometimes know us better than we know ourselves." Current Directions in Psychological Science (2011): 104-108. Document.
Vazire, Simine and Matthias R. Mehl. "Knowing me, knowing you: the accuracy and unique predictive validity of self-ratings and other-ratings of daily behavior." Journal of personality and social psychology (2008). Print.
Vazire, Simine, Timothy D and eds Wilson. Handbook of self-knowledge. Guilford Press, 2012.
