It’s almost Election Day 2020 in the United States, and political tensions are historically high. This year has been saturated with massive protests for social justice, violent riots, foreign interference in democratic processes, economic recession, reemergence of the white supremacy movement, widespread scandals involving political officials, presidential impeachment trials, political clashes over government response to the pandemic, record-breaking natural disasters, and general social chaos. It’s been a year for the history books, to say the least. In fact, public opinion is so divided that some are skeptical that presidential power will transfer peacefully at the close of the election. Like most Americans, we can’t help but wonder: Who should be president?
Read More »Personality and Mindfulness – More Natural for Some than Others and How it Matters
Mindfulness has been around the world for centuries. For roughly 40 years and popularized by Jon Kabat-Zinn in the west, it’s been taught as a set of practices to increase insight, manage pain, and reduce stress. Also known as present-moment awareness, mindfulness has become a bright, shiny object in business literature and, to a growing extent, in research. Everyone is, to some extent, mindful. Hogan practitioner Chris Altizer, Hogan’s Brandon Ferrell, and PhD candidate Alessa Natale explored the question: Is trait mindfulness related to personality? Here’s the answer from their study recently published in Consulting Psychology Journal and covered by Forbes Magazine.
Read More »What Makes Up the Personality of a Successful Entrepreneur?
Businesses have long used the powerful information contained in personality assessments to facilitate leadership performance and outcomes. Understanding an individual’s personality—or their unique characteristic ways of being—can be helpful when seeking to identify those who may be well-suited to leadership roles (i.e., selection), as well as to improve the performance and outcomes of those already inhabiting leadership roles (i.e., development).
Read More »Staying Creative in a Virtual World
“Creativity is intelligence having fun” -Albert Einstein
Globally, since the pandemic began, we are working more hours, engaged in more meetings, sending even more emails, and finding the performance-like nature of video calls exhausting. As many of us adapt to new environments, it can be difficult to find the time or energy for creativity. However, creativity is what’s needed most if our businesses and organizations are going to survive.
Read More »Six Safety-Conscious Personality Traits for the Post-COVID Workplace
With many workers returning to their offices, preventing the spread of COVID-19 and protecting employee health is a top priority for business leaders. While initiatives like enhanced sanitation and social distancing policies are a must, the biggest threat to workplace health and safety is often overlooked by managers—recruiting safety-conscious staff.
The Hogan Safety Report, which scores candidates on several components of safety-conscious behavior, has identified six personality traits that recruiters should look for in new candidates.
Read More »How to Use Existing Resources to Address Difficult People Issues
Many of our clients use Hogan Assessments to support selection and talent development programs. Due to the pandemic, however, selection has (understandably) been cut back dramatically. Now, HR teams have to focus on more difficult people issues while learning and development programs may be put on hold.
Read More »The Dark Side of Entrepreneurship: Avoiding Personal and Organizational Derailment
Entrepreneurs tend to have a heroic status around the globe — and for good reason. Entrepreneurialism encourages individual proactivity, creativity, and economic vitality, yet a significant number of startups fail for many well-documented reasons. The organizational psychologist in me wonders: What does personality psychology have to say about derailed entrepreneurial enterprises?
As noted, entrepreneurs play a key role in keeping economies competitive. They are known for removing the old and inefficient and replacing it with the new and improved, which suggests that entrepreneurs are creative people. Michael Kirton’s work on creative problem-solving shows how entrepreneurial people often take an innovative approach by questioning assumptions, redefining the problem, and introducing different solutions.
Read More »Parkinson’s Law in the Age of the Pandemic
C. Northcote Parkinson (1909—1993) was a British naval historian, lecturer, and novelist; he formulated his famous law in an essay in The Economist in 1955. Parkinson’s law was intended to describe the behavior of managers in the British Navy and British government, but it is also a pretty good description of work in most organizations. The July 11th, 2020 issue of The Economist provides an update of Parkinson’s astute generalization about organizational behavior.
Read More »Personality and the Problem of Police Brutality
The cases of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor represent just two recent and horrific examples of police brutality resulting in unnecessary loss of human life. The awfulness of these cases is amplified by fact that African Americans—both George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are black—are more than 2.5 times as likely to be killed by police than white Americans. Although statisticians, social scientists, and activists dispute the root cause of this difference (e.g., systemic racism, crime rates, culture, socioeconomics), one thing is for sure: when a police officer takes the life of another person the responsibility for doing so lies ultimately with that officer.
Read More »Q&A: Natural Language Processing
The amount of text data we send out in the world is staggering. On average, there are 500 million tweets sent per day, 23 billion text messages, and 306.4 billion emails. Everything we say, every email we send, and every word on our resumes can be used to understand the world around us, and it also gives us clues about the individual speaking or writing. Hogan’s Data Science team is exploring how best to capture text data and harness its power in understanding human nature. Below are some frequently asked questions that people unfamiliar with text-based machine learning often ask us.
Q: What is NLP?
A: NLP is a type of artificial intelligence that uses machine learning to break down, process, and quantify human language. NLP helps us understand the hidden stories within text-based data. Read More »