Active, Passive, Boring, Extreme, Herd 

As far as psychology goes, there are many classifications concocted by witty industry professionals to confuse us, but it’s better to keep it simple. When it comes to work ethics, people can be categorised as either active or passive.
Active People are hard working; they work for personal, family, financial or other motivations.
Passive People perform in order to have for the basic necessities; they strive to live the most and contribute the least. They want minimal responsibility and are usually rewarded with the minimum wage.
Emotionally there are two types of people, The Boring and The Extreme.
The Boring only appear boring when they are compared to the Extreme, but for the sake of typecasting, the Boring will not rock the boat, raise undue objections, or ‘excite’ people into ‘rebellious’ activities. If there is a gene therapy for the Boring, it probably wouldn’t help, because some people just prefer to be plain boring.
The Extreme people have something to do or say, for better or for worse, and fill the void created by the Boring. The more entertaining an Extreme person is, the more threatening they are to the civilised status quo of any office. Quite often the Extreme people, who are vastly outnumbered by the Boring, are not fired or retrenched, because like indoor plants, they provide a sense of life. And they’re usually the people that get things done.
The mix of Active and Passive, Boring and Extreme plays an important part in any office because too much of one breed leads to an imbalance, and people of different sets are always in conflict. Learn to pigeonhole people rather than trying to understand the complexities of their character, because like it or not they’ve probably already labelled you.
Active and Passive, Boring and Extreme is a very simple means of understanding your colleagues as individuals, so here are some additional markers of human behaviour which relate to the Herd:
The Leaders. The alpha male/female, those born to win, the captains of industry, the movers and shakers. With leaders it is important to grasp what they have to grasp; are they just a dispensable manager of a herd of easily-downsizeable drones in a global company, or is their business really their business – so if it goes down, so does their house, family, and the pet dog may go hungry.
The former type, those leaders who are safely embedded in an organisation that is not their own, are more susceptible to the fusing of their power and ego into a sycophantic and paranoid mess. And yet they maintain a veneer of dictatorial responsibility and bullet-proof status. They lose their rational faculties as their master, the organisation, grooms them into becoming the perfect product of the organisation. It must be noted that the personality traits of these leaders trickles down to the people below them, so that some of the minions emulate the leader as he/she/it emulates the organisation. These leaders are also artful at avoiding accountability for the fuss they cause – they can shift blame like a magician pulling a fluffy white rabbit out of a dusty black hat.
The Followers. People enjoy following a good leader; it is in our genes. But it can easily be confused with being a yes-man, one of the lambs, the intolerable sloth, or the meek and weak. There is nothing wrong with following, unless it’s a lemming over a cliff.
The Audience. Think of all the complainers, agitators, and whingers who complain, ‘you should have done it this way’, and yet they never risk anything themselves. And still they applaud at appropriate moments, or else they get fired.
Intellectual Terrorists. There’s one in every bunch. They are not leaders, or complainers, they represent a lone voice of reason in a sea of subservience. According to corporate propaganda ‘creative input’ is highly valued, but only if it comes from consultants and those up the ladder who are paid more for their supposedly ‘enlightened’ and ‘educated’ perspective on how to run things they aren’t involved with. If ‘creative input’ comes from other quarters, then the person is labelled a loner, an agitator, or worse still, Intellectual Terrorist.  Watch out.
People are people; it is good to know what they’re on about superficially, but to know too much will only make you sorry for them. Don’t take the bait. Don’t try to change them. Know what you are to them, and they to you.