Personality and The Fate of Organizations

Three considerations prompted me to write this volume. They reflect my concerns about (a) the way psychologists think about the nature and utility of the concept of personality, (b) the way they think about leadership and managerial competence, and (c) the way they think about people in organizations. I believe that these topics are largely misunderstood; certainly, my views on these subjects depart substantially from the received opinion of mainstream psychology. Moreover, the topics are related, because leadership and managerial performance are a direct function of a person's personality, and, in turn, they directly influence the effectiveness of organizations. The confusion has come about in two ways. First, at least until recently, psychologists doubted the relevance— perhaps even the existence—of personality, and therefore the utility of personality assessment.

Second, since the late 1920s, applied psychology has been ideologically predisposed to supportmanagement practices, as opposed to being sympathetic with labor issues (Kornhauser, 1930; Zickar, 2001). The first department of applied psychology in the United States, at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, was closed in 1923 precisely because the faculty were involved in labor reform and worked with Samuel Gompers, the president of the biggest steelworkers' union at the time. Thus, industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology has historically been pro-management. Consistent with this pro-management bias, business psychologists typically overestimate the competence of managers across the spectrum of organizations in which people work. This volume is about using personality to understand, evaluate, select, deselect, and train managers; to staff teams; and to understand organizations.

The book strives to be nontechnical and hopefully will interest anyone who is curious about people, careers, and organizational politics. At the same time, the volume is largely empirical, so that the major statements and claims are mostly supported by evidence. Many smart nonpsychologists who have read and commented on draft chapters have claimed to find them interesting and intelligible.

The book begins with an introduction to and overview of personality theory. Although personality theory is about human nature and should be of great general interest, it is not a prominent feature of the undergraduate psychology curriculum and few readers will have a background in the subject. Thus, this introduction seems necessary. Chapter 2 is a brief intellectual history of personality psychology over the past 50 years. I try to show why, despite the obvious importance of personality psychology, it nearly went away as a discipline, and why it has recently reemerged. Chapter 3 concerns leadership and personality. I argue that individual differences in the talent for leadership are real, that they are related empirically to personality, and that who a person is determines how that person will lead.

Chapter 4 concerns personality and team performance. Most significant human accomplishments come from group efforts. This chapter shows how group efforts can be reduced to the contributions of individuals. I conclude the chapter with a discussion of the practical problem of team development. Chapter 5 is about organizational theory. I describe certain universal, unavoidable, and recurring themes in organizations that recur precisely because they reflect universal themes in human nature. This chapter is an effort to explain the dynamics of organizations in terms of individual personalities. Chapter 6 returns to the topic of leadership; leadership is the link between individual personality and the performance of organizations. In this chapter, I argue that it is a mistake to confuse leadership with the behavior of business executives, elected public officials, and senior military officers. I argue further that many of these people will fail as leaders, then enumerate the reasons for their failure, all of which are rooted in their personalities. Finally, in chapter 7 I outline methods for improving the performance of existing leaders. When the performance of existing leaders improves, the change will improve the quality of life for their subordinates and the performance of the organizational units for which they are responsible. The book is unique in two ways. First, it takes personality seriously— it assumes that personality is real, and that it determines the careers of individuals and the fate of organizations. Second, it shows how large-scale organizational phenomena—the subject matter of sociology, history, and political science—can be (and indeed should be) understood in terms of the aspirations and behavior of single individuals—in terms of human nature.

Continues...

Excerpted from Personality and The Fate of Organizations by Robert Hogan. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Hogan Assessment Systems, Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Robert Hogan, Ph.D.
Robert Hogan, president of Hogan Assessment Systems, is an authority on personality assessment, leadership, and organizational effectiveness. He was a psychology professor for more than 30 years at The University of Tulsa and at Johns Hopkins University. Hogan is the author of more than 300 journal articles, chapters and books, including "Personality and the Fate of Organizations," published in 2006. Hogan received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in personality assessment. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology.

"While no book can offer a road map of the fog that many organizational behavior researchers have regarding personality, this book does shine considerable light on important topics. There is no doubt it will be considered new and fresh. There are few writers in the organizational sciences – or psychology for that matter—who can communicate materials as engagingly as Robert Hogan. He brings the subject of personality to life, and in doing so presents previously explored and unexplored concepts central to personality psychology."

Timothy A. Judge
Department of Management
University of Florida

"Bob Hogan has taught me more about leadership and personality—both intellectually and experientially—than any person I know. Given what is happening on the world stage as well as in our political, business, health care, and educational systems, this book should be mandatory reading for anyone in a position of authority. Leadership is the number one issue of the day, and we have tolerated weak or mediocre performance form our leaders for far too long."

Gordon Curphy
President
C3

"It is rare to find such a seriously research, thoughtfully constructed and paradigm-challenging book so easy to read. This must be on the prescribed reading list of undergraduates and graduates in personality theory, organizational behavior and HR management, as well as read by all consultants and managers interested in the role of personality and individual differences in the workplace."

Adrian Furnham
Professor of Psychology
University of College London

"A superb demonstration of the importance of personality traits in organizational contexts, and a lesson for any organizational psychologist (and manager) who undermines the importance of personality in sociological, historical, and political settings. Hogan's new book provides a theoretical and scientifically robust explanation of leadership, managerial incompetence, and job success, in a unique and charming style that is both a joy to read and accessible to everyone. No other author has accomplished this task with such brilliance, and no other book has succeeded at bridging the gap between academic and business knowledge with such accuracy and simplicity: a real masterpiece!"

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
Department of Psychology
University of London, Goldsmiths College

JOHN W. FLEENOR
Book Review Editor

Center for Creative Leadership
Greensboro, North Carolina

COPYRIGHT © 2007 BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC.

BOOK REVIEW ADVISORY PANEL

David G. Altman, Center for Creative Leadership
Gary B. Brumback, Palm Coast, FL
Victoria Buenger, Texas A&M University
Robert G. Jones, Missouri State University
Claude Levy-Leboyer, Institut de Recherches et D'Applications en Psychologie du Travail
Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford University
Malcolm James Ree, Our Lady of the Lake University
Paul Spector, University of South Florida
Lynn Summers, North Carolina Office of State Personnel
Paul W. Thayer, North Carolina State University

BOOK REVIEWS

Robert Hogan. Personality and the Fate of Organizations. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007, 167 pages, $24.95 softcover. Reviewed by Seymour Adler, Senior Vice President, Aon Consulting, New York, NY.

If you have any interest whatsoever in personality, in organizations, in leadership - and especially if you are interested in all three - go online and order this thin volume. It is packed with more insight, entertainingly presented, than a shelf full of recent works on these topics. For the most part, the insight and advice rest on strong empirical findings. No wonder major contributors to the empirical literature on personality and work behavior like Judge and Furnham have provided the publisher with their personal endorsements of the book.

This is a book with an attitude, a strong point of view about the fundamental issues on the topic. There are fewer qualifications, less neutrality or uncertainty or respect for opposing viewpoints, than you might see from more dispassionate academic works. The author opines with confidence, bordering at times on arrogance, and he has every right. Hogan is a pioneer and spent many years as a fairly lonely pioneer at that. He made significant contributions in the 1970s when personality was in a deep Ice Age, and virtually no serious scientific work was being conducted in the area. The instrument he designed and validated back then is today one of the most widely used in industry as both a preemployment and developmental assessment. He drew our attention to the "dark side" of personality, particularly leader personality, in the 1980s. Also in the 1980s he published papers on personality and team composition, one of the "hot topics" of the past 5 years. As casual as he is in tossing off his opinions, make no mistake; Hogan has a firm command of the relevant science and practice and has given these issues deep thought over the decades.

Passionate, deeply knowledgeable authors who project strong attitude run the risk of making statements that are over the top and of seeing issues through a very personalized prism. This book is, in my view, replete with such "over the top" and excessively personal assertions, most of which are entertainingly transmitted. To cite just a few: "colleges and universities are typically led by failed academics"; "most business books are empirical nonsense"; "academic psychology ... depicts senior managers in business as a race of heroes"; "the academic tradition is a collection of decontextualized facts that do not add up to a persuasive account of leadership." He describes his approach to leadership as part of "a tradition extending from Freud and Weber to me." He characterizes one of his own insights as "one of my most important claims." More than once he describes Maslow as a 1930s Marxist and argues that Maslow's ideas should be rejected not so much because they are too fuzzy to test or have not been supported by empirical research (both of which he acknowledges) but because history has shown that the Marxism on which Maslow based his theories is a failed ideology. Hogan saves his sharpest barbs for consultants. One instance: "I believed this estimate (of a low base rate for managerial incompetence) was self-serving and designed to flatter potential clients." Another example: "The resurgence has been largely stimulated by consultants who realized they could sell assessment results to the business community." In short, you never have to guess where Hogan stands.

The book is divided into seven chapters, each of which could stand on its own as an essay on an aspect of personality and organizations.

The first chapter lays out the key components of Hogan's approach, including his important distinction between identity and reputation. He shows how the five factor model reflects the reputational side of personality. This chapter also introduces the distinction that Hogan has made between the motives for getting ahead, getting along, and making meaning. The heart of Hogan's approach is the recognition that personality plays itself out in the social contexts that are the natural and evolutionarily based milieu for human behavior.

Chapter 2 presents a succinct history of the "personality wars," with Hogan himself as a warrior in some of the later stages. In his view, the near-demise of personality psychology in the 1960s was brought about in part by self-inflicted wounds perpetrated by personality psychologists on both sides of the Atlantic whose theories lacked coherence and precision and whose measures were weak, often transported inappropriately from clinical contexts. In addition, the academic world for most of the last half of the 20th century was biased against individual difference psychology (especially after Jensen's work on race and intelligence), was swept up in what Hogan calls neo-romantic notions of self-reinvention, and was strongly behaviorist/situationalist in orientation. As a result, academia shunned the study of personality. The key factors that in his view have led to a rebirth of personality psychology in recent years are the emergence of the five factor model, EQ, the competency movement, the EEOC's call to look for alternative assessments to go with less adverse impact, and the popularity of the Myers-Briggs ("harmless and it provides a nice income for many consultants").

The third chapter looks at personality and leadership, and argues that the appropriate criterion for leader effectiveness is the performance over time of the group that the individual is leading. The chapter reviews some of the key findings that show that leaders indeed strongly influence group performance and that demonstrate that there are key traits that impact the extent of that influence. Reputationally, that is in the eyes of their followers, effective leaders are resilient and self-confident, build relations, are decisive and visionary, are competent and persistent problem-solvers, and demonstrate integrity and humility. Hogan here suggests that we pay more attention to the psychology of followers in our study of leadership.

Chapter 4 focuses on the relationship between personality and behavior and performance in teams. Among the issues Hogan considers is the question of team composition and the interplay of member differences in cognitive and personality traits on how team members are treated. He also draws on Holland's well-known model of vocational interests to provide a taxonomy of team tasks. Here Hogan is addressing a major gap that exists in most accounts of personality by specifying the pathways that link personality factors to corresponding situational factors in producing performance differences across teams. To his credit, he not only provides a valuable model of team tasks, he builds that model on the strong empirical base that has accumulated for Holland's theory over the past 3 decades.

In many ways Chapter 5, intriguingly titled "The Secret Lives of Organizations," is the most daring and interesting in the book. Here, with full awareness of the risks of reductionism, Hogan proposes that personality processes - many unconscious - underlie a large set of core organizational constants. All organizations are hierarchies, with resources and power differentially distributed, and an accumulating set of rules intended to control misconduct (that these rules, once promulgated, are never rescinded Hogan calls the Law of Nomological Nonbiodegradability). Moreover, he argues that organizational effectiveness also ultimately reduces to individual personality. After all, organizational effectiveness is in the result of quality leadership and a talented and motivated workforce. Both organizational theorists and executives ignore these personality-based factors at their peril.

Chapter 6 brings us to a discussion of the "dark side" of leadership. Hogan is not content only to document, both normatively and anecdotally, widespread managerial incompetence. He counts the ways leaders are incompetent and the sources of that incompetence. He has mapped the commonly identified career derailers from the leadership development literature to the commonly identified personality disorders from the clinical literature. And he has developed sound measures of the key dimensions of this dark side. Among his insights: Flawed personality styles frequently coexist with strong social skills, and as a consequence, these flawed leaders often get very far in their careers and inflict much damage before being derailed.

The last chapter, on leadership development, is surprisingly academic. Hogan spends much time on theories of learning and little on tools or techniques for building leader competence. He ascribes widespread managerial incompetence to the fact that leadership is not systematically taught in our educational systems. He argues, in common with most I.-O practitioners, that effective leadership development should be based on thorough, valid leadership assessment. Some readers will find particularly valuable Hogan's generic competency model, which organizes common managerial competencies into four broad domains: interpersonal, intrapersonal, technical, and leadership. This final chapter does not summarize the book in any way or present a concluding peroration to a strongly argued case. In that sense, Hogan ends the book a bit abruptly for my taste.

This book is likely to appeal to academics and graduate students from a broad range of organizational disciplines, to consultants (assuming they can get past the criticism), and to a small subset of more thoughtful and behaviorally knowledgeable managers. Readers will find this book, in all, a stimulating, provocative read on an important topic from a master with an attitude.