Delia Ephron, a best-selling American author, screenwriter, and playwright, published an essay in the New York Times on August 31st, 2014 entitled “Ouch, My Personality, Reviewed” that is a superb example of what Freud called “the psychopathology of everyday life.” She starts the essay by noting that she recently used Uber, the car service for metrosexuals, and the driver told her that if she received one more bad review, “…no driver will pick you up.” She reports that this feedback triggered some “obsessive” soul searching: she wondered how she could have created such a bad score as an Uber passenger when she had only used the service 6 times. She then reviewed her trips, noting that, although she had often behaved badly (“I do get short tempered when I am anxious”), in each case extenuating circumstances caused her behavior. She even got a bad review after a trip during which she said very little: “Perhaps I simply am not a nice person and an Uber driver sensed it.”
The essay is interesting because it is prototypical of people who can’t learn from experience. For example, when Ms. Ephron reviewed the situations in which she mistreated Uber drivers, she spun each incident to show that her behavior should be understood in terms of the circumstances—the driver’s poor performance—and not in terms of her personality. Perhaps situational explanations are the last refuge of both neurotics and social psychologists?
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Are you looking for any easy way to sharpen your interpretation of the Hogan Personality Inventory? There’s an app for that.
Now available for iOS and Android tablet devices, Hogan Pick 2 HPI allows you to easily interpret the high or low score implications of any two HPI scores by tapping LOW or HIGH for any two HPI scales. The INTERPRETATION panel will display behaviors you can expect from someone with similar HPI score combinations.
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An unbalanced team can be an operational nightmare – projects stall, ideas dry up, and morale plummets. Fortunately, unbalanced teams manifest themselves in five predictable ways, each of which can be fixed by bringing in people to fill gaps, or reassigning people where too many individuals are trying to fill a role.
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Challenge: The quality of a patient ’s experience plays an important role in defining the competitive advantage of healthcare organizations, especially during times of change and reform. Because nurses have the most frequent and direct contact with patients, their performance and behaviors have a significant impact on patient evaluations.
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Here’s the rundown of useful articles from the second quarter of 2014.
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People universally look for the same characteristics in their leaders – integrity, judgment, business acumen, and vision. However, every culture has a set of social norms that color leader behavior. Global Alliances consultant Michael Sanger explores the differences in eastern and western leadership styles.
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More than 80% of Americans are stressed about their jobs, and 75% of people said the most stressful aspect is their boss. Although a few bad bosses seem inevitable, the chronic stress they cause costs companies $300 billion annually. What can companies do about bad bosses and the stress they cause?
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We’ve all dealt with them – the employee that makes questionable decisions around the office, whether that’s stealing some pens from the supply closet or, more seriously, pocketing company revenue on the sly.
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In business, the adage holds true that one bad apple can spoil the bunch – even one dishonest manager can cost companies hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, in low morale and lost productivity. Unfortunately, history shows that there is more than one bad apple in the business world, and dishonest work behaviors, such as staff abuse, rule bending, and theft cost the economy billions each year.
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