Personality psychology began with German and Swiss psychiatry; Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung exerted an immense historical influence on all theorizing about human nature. In particular, they argued that everyone has problems and that their problems are caused by being out of touch with their emotions, by lacking appropriate self-knowledge. The solution to their problems is enhanced self-awareness, fostered and guided by feedback from a therapist. This line of thought encourages self-absorption, but more importantly, it ignores the impact of a person on other people; other people are not significant in these theories. Freud and Jung founded the intrapsychic tradition of personality psychology—they focused attention almost exclusively on the process of inner exploration. There is an alternative view of personality that begins with William McDougall and extends through Timothy Leary, George Kelly, and Jerry Wiggins. These (Scottish/Irish/English) writers argued that peoples’ problems are caused by the way they perceive and treat other people. They started the interpersonal tradition of personality psychology—they focus almost exclusively on interpersonal relationships. I identify with the interpersonal tradition for two reasons. First, Freud and Jung thought introspection was the key to psychological health, but introspective tendencies are uncorrelated with career success; many happy and successful people (Voltaire, U.S. Grant, Ronald Reagan) were incapable of introspection. Second, humans evolved as group living animals, and success in life entirely depends on social acceptance and approval—i.e., on building and maintaining effective relationships. The study of relationships is an entire field of psychology; I can summarize the news from this field in terms of four broad points. First and most importantly, every relationship is an exchange process; successful relationships depend on both parties receiving some benefit. Thus, popular people are rewarding to deal with; unpopular people are punishing to deal with. There is only one way to be rewarding—by being consistent and accepting of others. There are many ways to be punishing—by being moody, hostile, inconsistent, untrustworthy, self-centered, or even weird. That which is exchanged during social interaction is respect and affection; after every interaction a person gains or loses a small bit of respect and affection depending on his/her performance. A person’s reputation is the summary of this accounting process, and smart people pay attention to it. Second, relationships evolve in systematic ways over the human life cycle. The earliest kind of relationship is that between an infant and its caretakers; this process has been brilliantly analyzed by John Bowlby in his Attachment and Loss trilogy. Forming secure attachment bonds with caretakers is the source of self-esteem and the foundation of all subsequent psychological development; attachment is eroded by “separation”—physical or emotional. Bowlby compares separation to exposure to radiation; it is bad in any amount and it accumulates. The next kind of relationship concerns dealing with adult authority; to survive, children must learn to accept the rules of authority (for example, to learn language children must accept what they are told about names), and this is facilitated by secure attachment relations. Then, around age five, all children enter a peer group; they must then learn to negotiate relationships with peers—as opposed to demanding and accepting resources from adults. At some later point in adolescence the mating dance begins. This seems mostly to be hormone-driven chaos, but one firm generalization is that relationships founded on similar values tend to endure, and those based on dissimilar values do not. Finally, young people enter the world of work where they must negotiate a wide variety of relationships and this is a function of social skill. Third, successful leadership involves managing three kinds of relationship problems. The first are relationships with subordinates; this is the primary focus of most discussions of leadership, and by far the easiest problem to deal with. The second are relationships with peers. Here the solution is to assure one’s peers that, if you become their boss, you will treat them fairly. The third problem is relations with superiors, and this one is crucial. The careers of Stanley O’Neal and John Thain, the recently failed CEOs of Merrill Lynch, are instructive because both men are similar in many ways. They are both talented and good with numbers and cost control; they are both arrogant, cold, and remote. But most importantly, both of them were superb at managing relations with their superiors (especially the board), while ignoring relations with subordinates. Such people, when they are talented, rise rapidly in organizations. They have great individual careers, but their damaged relationships with their subordinates inevitably undermine their leadership.People are hard wired by evolution to seek social acceptance and status during social interaction. Life is about getting along and getting ahead, and both outcomes depend on relationships and on the social skill needed to maintain them. Social skill is like any other skill—it can be coached. But successful coaching depends on a good assessment of the person’s current level of performance. Personality assessment is the key to enhancing social skills and relationship management.
Personality: Theories and Applications Now Available for Purchase
HoganPress is pleased to announce the second-edition release of Personality: Theories and Applications, by Robert Hogan and Robert Smither. From the back cover:
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John Holland
What is the Most Significant Change Coming for the HR Profession?
The following is a column by Dr. Robert Hogan, that recently appeared in the "2009 Forecast" edition of Human Resources Executive. Dr. Hogan was asked to comment on what he sees as the most significant change affecting the HR community in the future.
By now, everyone is aware of the coming demographic tsunami which will be defined by the retirement of the baby boomer generation. On the one hand, this means that a lot of talent and institutional memory will walk out the doors. On the other hand, the replacement pool—composed of the young, the inexperienced, and the untried—will grow steadily smaller. The generic answer to dealing with this looming problem is called talent retention, and a number of talent retention models are available for commercial consumption.
Talent retention can be broken down into two generic strategies. The first concerns how to retain older workers past their normal retirement date. The second strategy concerns how to attract and retain talented replacements for the retirees. Standard talent retention solutions involve special training, on boarding, compensation, and career pathing packages, all of which are sensible structural solutions. However, what is missing from most talent retention packages is a careful consideration of the human factor. The critical insight comes from the Gallup research, which shows quite clearly that people don’t quit organizations, they quit their immediate bosses. Unless and until talent retention programs take this crucial generalization into account, they will not be effective tools in the coming war for talent.
Research data gathered over the past three decades clearly indicate three conclusions.
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George Bernard Shaw and the Concept of Faking It
Dr. Hogan Interviewed on The Doug Noll Show
Doug Noll interviewed Robert Hogan about the dark side of leadership on Thursday, October 16. Links to the audio segments appear below.
Excerpted from the Doug Noll Show's website:
Defective and dark leadership is the single most pressing problem facing humanity. In Corporate America, over 65 percent of the managers and leaders are incompetent, defective, or badly flawed. A higher percentage exists in government. The costs are staggering and one only has to look at the financial market melt down of the past months to understand the enormity of the problem.
Doug and Robert begin by understanding leadership through the lens of evolutionary psychology. Leadership evolved in humans as a way to come together for a short time to accomplish a common goal. Thus, humans became hard wired genetically to form social, hierarchal groups with leaders in charge. The most effective leaders were humble, supported the group and its goals, and was not self-aggrandizing. With the development of agriculture about 12,000 years ago, Robert describes the rise of the kleptocracy, which persists today. This is a class of leaders that rose to high status through power grabs, political maneuvering, technical competence, and raw luck. Once high leadership status was achieved, this class ahd no difficulty stealing from the groups it was leading. Leadership, as Robert sees it, is the ability to build and maintain a high performing team. Over time, this team will compete well against other like-minded teams.
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Personality and Financial Management
The Shoe Fits
In this cover story from Canadian publication Advisor's Edge, Dr. Robert Hogan discusses the validity of personality assessment in the selection process, as well as his pioneering role in the history of personality testing.
Dr. Robert Hogan, an international authority on personality assessment, recalls facing stiff resistance from academics and lawyers when he and his wife pioneered personality testing in the United States in the early ’70s. “The furor was like Galileo saying the earth revolves around the sun. It was a big career risk.”
Read the full text of the article by downloading the PDF here.
Validity
For test developers and test users, validity is the most fundamental concept in psychological assessment. It is also a surprisingly vexed notion. A review of the literature on validity composed by the “great minds” (e.g., Lee Cronbach, Jane Loevinger, Paul Meehl) will give you a case of vertigo. The definition of validity found in the AERA Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing is a statement by a committee—in the same way that a camel is a horse designed by a committee.
The confusion about validity is the result of the way psychological measurement was conceptualized at the outset, beginning with Charles Spearman’s research on intelligence. Spearman taught at a private boys’ school; he noticed that his students’ scores on their various academic examinations were correlated. Based on this, he derived two conclusions. First, he proposed that there was a single, general factor underlying performance on all the exams. And second, he proposed that that factor was (or reflected) “intelligence”.
Spearman set the framework and the terms of the discussion for all subsequent assessment research. The framework consists of two assumptions that follow from his two conclusions. Since Spearman’s time, virtually all psychological assessment has been based on these assumptions, neither of which is necessary or necessarily true. The first assumption is that individual differences in human performance depend on, or are related to, or reflect individual differences in the strength or magnitude of a corresponding underlying trait or propensity. The second assumption is that the goal of assessment is to measure individual differences in the strength or magnitude of the underlying trait. In this view, the goal of assessment is to measure traits. This view is never questioned, and it has implications for understanding validity. In this standard model, a test or measure is valid to the degree that it accurately measures the underlying trait.
But this view of validity makes it impossible ever to determine validity. The problem is that the actual existence of traits is questionable on genetic and neuropsychological grounds. There are no anatomical or neurological structures corresponding to any of the many traits that have been proposed. Consequently, it is by definition impossible to determine whether a test accurately measures an underlying trait—because the existence of trait is in doubt.
The confusion about the meaning of validity can be resolved fairly easily with a simplifying assumption. If we assume that the goal of assessment is to predict outcomes, then validity can be defined in terms of the ability to predict those outcomes. A measure of sales performance is valid if it predicts sales performance; a measure of customer service potential is valid if it predicts ratings of customer service, and so on. This view makes no assumptions about the existence of underlying traits the strength of which causes performance. It simply stipulates that assessment has a job to do, and that job is to predict non-test outcomes. This definition of validity satisfies the requirement of Occam’s razor, which states that one ought not multiply causal entities unnecessarily; the definition also satisfies the aesthetic of the Bauhaus movement which states that less is more.