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Last Saturday I enjoyed a few hours of tailgating with old college friends. The next morning I got up and went to church. I enjoyed letting loose like John Blutarsky on Saturday, and on Sunday I ratcheted things back in the general direction of Ned Flanders. One might ask which is the real me – the “Animal House” version or the “God’s house” version? The answer, of course, is both. Like any functioning adult, I adjust my behavior to accommodate my surroundings. This is nothing special or unique about me – none of us act exactly the same at church as we would at a tailgate party. The same applies at work, where our behavior varies around supervisors versus peers or subordinates.

This is common sense, but has caused problems in the world of performance appraisal, especially multi-source (or 360) ratings. Historically, professionals assumed that each person has one true performance level, and dismissed differences across raters as error. Only in the last two years have researchers concluded that (shockingly) a person’s performance varies across contexts, and various parties think differently about effective job performance. Specifically, supervisors focus on technical performance, whereas peers and subordinates focus on interpersonal and leadership performance, respectively. Research now confirms what basic logic tells us – our performance varies across different groups at work, and those groups expect different behavior from us.

These insights hold major implications for personality assessment and employee development initiatives, especially leadership development. Historically, these efforts provide employees with feedback about maximizing performance in light of personality, but have done so by considering how the person looks on average across all groups. However, by considering rating differences across groups, we can tailor this information to inform employees about specific changes they can make to maximize their performance as viewed by supervisors, peers, subordinates, or other groups. This line of thinking represents a more dynamic, flexible, and multi-faceted view on personality and performance, and falls more in line with the common sense notion that we may each act like John Blutarsky in one instance and Ned Flanders in another.

I’ve had a lot of jobs. In my short 11-year tenure of being a working adult, I’ve held positions in two advertising agencies, two marketing departments and a radio station. Through all of them, one thing remained the same. My boss always affected the way I felt about my job.

My first job was as the lowest man on the totem pole in a tyrannically-run advertising agency. It was low pay, zero respect and very long hours. Both newbies and veterans scattered like cockroaches when the owner was around. And the creative director was a raging…well, she had ridiculous expectations of her minions. I left after a year and a half, as most people do at that agency.

My next job was in the marketing department of my family-owned manufacturing company. While working for family may sound like a cush gig, I knew absolutely nothing about flexographic printing and desperately wanted to impress them. They were very busy with little time to teach me the ropes so I floundered along for three years.

After being in manufacturing, I wanted to get back in to advertising so I accepted a position with a small agency. I had good friends and the environment was fun but my boss never had one good thing to say about anyone and made snide comments not only behind your back, but also to your face. These comments were always ‘in jest,’ of course, but everyone knew he meant them. I’ve always held the belief that you have to give respect in order to get respect. Evidently, he didn’t feel the same. Towards the end of my four years there, I despised going to work.

My job as promotions director at the radio station was another new work experience for me. My supervisors there were fun but had erratic tempers. After having stress-induced hives for eight days, it was a blessing in disguise to be laid off along with 1800 other people.

The marketing department at Hogan has been the best experience by far. (And I’m not just sucking up when I say that.) It’s a laid-back, creative, fun environment that I enjoy every day. I’ve also learned a lot about myself including why all of those previous jobs were not right for me and why most of my old supervisors were not good leaders. It has been a developmental milestone to realize my recurring problem of less-than-savory supervisors was not actually my fault and I was actually a successful employee. So if you’re in the same boat, it’s most likely not your fault either. Bad managers are running rampant.

A quote by Dr. Hogan really brought it all home and has stuck with me. He says, “People don’t quit their job, they quit their boss.”

I think he’s right.

Last week, Steven Slater, the former JetBlue flight attendant acted out the fantasy of a large contingent of employees who have had enough of on-the-job stresses. After a heated exchange with a passenger (an exchange that is now more in doubt than previously reported), he grabbed the PA and let out a few choice words, grabbed his stuff (including a few beers), and stormed off of the plane via the emergency exit slide announcing that he quit. Fortunately, the plane was on the tarmac and near the gate. Nobody was injured.

In the aftermath of this instant-classic example of how to quit one’s job, Mr. Slater has garnered the adulation of many, as evidenced by the numerous Facebook fan pages with thousands of friends and any number of blogs on the internet. Many have romanticized his actions, making him out to be a man who stood up for himself, didn’t take abuse from anyone, or had just had enough and decided it was time to move on.

However, the reality of the situation is quite a bit different. Within days, Mr. Slater had retained a lawyer, and was asking for his position with JetBlue back, saying he loved his job, the airline, and he wanted to return to work. His lawyer offered a number of explanations for his behavior, including the stress of the job, an injury sustained in the course of the flight, and a confrontation with an unruly passenger (which is, at this time, unsubstantiated by any of the passengers).

Mr. Slater’s behavior is actually a perfect example of derailing behavior. He lost his cool under stress, made an emotionally charged decision (the Excitable derailer), and executed his decision in a dramatic and attention-seeking manner (the Colorful derailer). Despite all the adoration lavished upon him in the aftermath, Mr. Slater quickly regretted his decision and is now contemplating a lawsuit to retain the position he so sensationally abandoned. A working-class hero sticking it to the man, or a case of derailment played out in dramatic fashion? The preponderance of evidence at this time points to the latter.

Jarrett Shalhoop
Senior Consultant
Hogan Assessment Systems

The worst oil spill in US history began when BP’s drilling rig, Deepwater Horizon, exploded on April 20, 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 crewmen and releasing as much as 65,000 barrels of oil per day into the sea. This disaster was the logical consequence of the worst safety record of any oil company operating in North America. As examples, consider the following:

? In 2005, an explosion in BP’s Texas City refinery killed 15 people and injured 180 more; a post-accident review indicated that safety procedures were either not followed or had not been established. BP was fined $21 million for the accident.

? In 2007, a corroded BP pipeline burst, releasing 200,000 gallons of crude oil into Prudhoe Bay, Alaska; this created an environmental hazard and required massive clean-up efforts. Investigators concluded that BP was aware of the pipeline corrosion but failed to take any corrective action. The spill cost BP vast sums of money in lost production during repairs, criminal fines, and state compensation.

? Since 2005, BP has admitted to breaking US environmental and safety laws, has paid $373 million in fines, and has been cited 760 times.

The financial benefits associated with creating a safe working environment are as obvious as is the moral obligation to do so. How do organizations create safe working environments? If the problem is placed in the proper conceptual context, the answer becomes quite clear. The three components that must come together to create a culture of workplace safety are: (a) worker personality; (b) a culture of worker engagement; and (c) organizational leadership.

Based on these three vital components of workplace safety, Hogan has developed a system of reliable and valid measures of individual differences in safety orientation.

The first step in creating a safe working environment involves hiring and training people who are disposed to work safely.

The second step concerns creating “engagement,” a concept at the intersection of employees and their organizations. Safety orientation is a trait; engagement is a state that is characterized by an employee’s feeling that the policy is consistent with that person’s own values, tendency to be energized by the policy, and sense that the policy makes overall sense in the workplace.

The third and most important step in creating a safety culture depends on the leadership of an organization. The principal factor driving accidents at work is the degree to which the leadership team emphasizes safety. This essential step in creating a safe working environment involves leadership teams building a culture of engagement with safety as a key element. If leadership teams fail to facilitate engagement, no amount of safety training will matter, nor will the safety orientations of individual workers.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve likely been hearing about the Mel Gibson audiotapes lately in the news. There’s no need to recount specific quotes in this family-friendly blog, but needless to say that Mel’s language could make a seasoned sailor blush. We’re obviously hearing Mel at a low point. He’s stressed about his finances, some negative publicity, and a recent divorce, not to mention that things clearly aren’t going all that well with his new love interest, who is recording their conversations. So it’s a tough time, and his behavior during this period is unfortunately playing out on a very public stage.

So what does this have to do with assessments and business results? The Mel Gibson thing is a prime example of how critical our behavior is when we’re stressed, under immense pressure, or just fatigued enough to let our guard down. In Hogan parlance, he is “derailing.” His behavior under duress has invited a heap of embarrassment and bad publicity, and his career is in jeopardy. His long-time talent agency has dropped him. The film studios, producers, financers, and other assorted movie-industry folks that have invested in the Mel Gibson brand are watching the value of their investment plummet.

In our world, I see this as a parallel to the growing movement to “focus on your strengths.” Such a perspective emphasizes what we do well, and essentially tells us not to worry about our weaknesses. Intuitively this is an attractive proposition – nobody likes to spend a bunch of time worrying about things we don’t do very well. But the reality is that these moments often occur during crucial periods such as when we have to make a critical decision or during a time of crisis. It is our behavior in these circumstances that can ultimately dictate how well we perform, how we are evaluated, and determine our reputation among others. People are quick to forget how we behaved when everything was going well.

At Hogan we promote the view that strengths are important, but that it is essential to be aware of one’s derailers and to target risks to performance. Indeed, any list of figures who have derailed in spectacular fashion will be populated with immensely talented people. They have ascended to positions of influence and been granted wide latitude and discretion based on impressive bodies of work and dazzling talent. But left unchecked, their derailers eventually led to poor decisions, inexcusable behavior, or other things to initiate their fall from grace.

Tying this back to our current subject matter, what were the first things that you thought of when you saw Mel Gibson at the top of this post? Was it a string of blockbusters? An impressive filmography that has grossed over $2B? An Academy Award for Best Director? Or was it a series of rants being played on the evening news? These brief periods of derailing behavior have dimmed what was otherwise one of Hollywood’s brightest stars.

Jarrett Shalhoop
Senior Consultant
Hogan Assessment Systems

Several years ago, Joyce and I visited the maximum security prison in McAlester, Oklahoma, and talked with some dangerous prisoners. Several of them asked us if we would hire them when they were released. This was the first time I thought seriously about “employability”.

The concept of employability is interesting for several reasons. First, it implies that there are individual differences in employability—which also means that people are to some degree responsible for their own employability. Second, if people are responsible for their own employability, then that creates a role for assessment—enhancing employability through strategic self-awareness. Third, although the concept of employability has been around in applied psychology since the 1920s, it has been almost entirely ignored by the academics. And finally, the changes in the world economy that have been going on since the 1970s have created widespread unemployment, job insecurity, and churn in the labor markets, all of which highlights the importance of employability.

Little is known in an empirical way about the determinants of employability, so the following comments are necessarily speculative. It seems to me that employability has three facets. The first concerns the characteristics that people need in order to get hired. This in turn means having the characteristics that hiring managers want to see in applicants. What might they be? Joyce Hogan has done the only systematic research on this topic (which she could not get published in an academic journal). She subscribed to the major newspaper in each of 11 census regions of the United States for one year. She collected the employment ads, and then content analyzed them (there were several thousand) to see what employers wanted in new hires. Her major finding was that the most important thing employers wanted to see at any hiring level was social skill—the ability to get along with colleagues and clients and work productively with others. Conversely, cognitive ability was not a priority for employers. In a nutshell, getting hired depends on bright side characteristics.

The second facet of employability concerns the characteristics that people need in order to retain their jobs. This, in turn, means having the characteristics that supervisors want to see in incumbents. And this is where the literature on derailment and the dark side becomes important. As most people know, dark side characteristics: (1) co-exist with attractive bright side characteristics; (2) always have a valuable component to them; but (3) end up eroding relationships over time, leading to job stagnation or dismissal.
The third facet of employability concerns the characteristics that people need to manage “career transitions”—to find another job after a company is downsized, to find another job after retiring from the first one, to succeed after being promoted to a job with new demands, etc. What seems important here is: (a) the desire to do well in a new job; and (b) flexibility, adaptability, and the capacity to change. The reader will note that all three facets concern personality and not cognitive ability.

Although academic psychology has largely overlooked the employability issue, real job seekers and job holders usually get the point. There are many non-profit and for profit organizations that help the unemployed find work. Training for finding employment focuses on impression management and networking, two major aspects of social skill. People are taught strategic self-awareness—how they will be perceived during an employment interview and what to do about it—and the importance of taking ownership in their job search by making constant inquiries and developing contacts. In one job search club for unemployed professionals, members are told that they are their own worst enemies when it comes to finding new jobs, that there is something about their attitudes, fears, and expectations about what they deserve from a job that explain their inability to find work. The task is to reconstruct and reinvent themselves, to learn to project a positive and optimistic attitude during the job search, to emphasize their flexibility, and downplay their need for stable, continuous, and predictable employment.

Managers and executives seeking new employment need to work on strategic self-awareness—how they are perceived and how to change the perceptions when they are counter-productive. Knowledge workers—network engineers, system administrators, IT specialists, and software developers—must take an entirely different approach. For them the key is to stay up to date regarding industry changes and new technology. Smart players are obsessively concerned about obsolescence, and develop multiple strategies for staying current. They are so sensitive to this issue that they engage in constant skill development even when they have excellent, well-paid, and desirable jobs. Knowledgeable readers will immediately recognize that the syndrome of obsessively staying up to date is a function of the HPI dimensions of Ambition, Inquisitive, and Learning Style, and not a function of cognitive ability.

Finally, it is worth noting that the best predictors of income or net financial worth are educational level and number of hours worked per week. Education level is related to cognitive ability, but so are conscientiousness and ambition and the correlations are about the same. Number of hours worked per week is almost entirely a function of conscientiousness and ambition. In the long run then, as Epictetus taught us, “Character is fate.”

— Dr. Robert Hogan

After two pre-dawn trips to retail Mecca, I became the proud owner of the much-coveted iPhone 4. It’s the first smart phone I’ve ever had, and its innovative design, personalized features, and functionality leave me impressed. Now I’m free from my desk and laptop when I want to check e-mails from work, catch up on online banking, or just goof off on Facebook. It would appear that I’ve finally become one of the “cool” people. Or maybe not.

Here’s the problem – I don’t have a case for my new phone. Although a few cases are available for the iPhone 4, they are less effective protection than the one I’d prefer, which won’t be available for anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of months. So while I wait, I’ve relegated my slick new phone to the box it came in, a temporary case to protect it from bumps, scratches, and my two kids, either of whom could strike at any moment. It seems ironic that such an investment is limited to the protection offered by a cardboard box. When my preferred case finally does become available, the condition of my iPhone will determine whether I made a good or bad choice. Either way, it’s a gamble.

Unfortunately, many organizations throughout the world make similar gambles, only with much greater investments and potential losses. Every organization is after the latest “iPhone 4” available to them, which may include new trends in assessment-based selection, High Potential identification, or other such programs. However, after investing considerable resources into selecting and otherwise identifying these individuals, some organizations don’t make further investments to protect their purchases. So instead of investing in assessment-based development programs to coach new hires, provide insights into derailing behaviors, or groom top talent, these organizations gamble on employees developing themselves. When employees take the initiative to develop critical competencies, the gamble works out. But when the employee fails to reach their full potential – or worse, turns over – the gamble fails.

Whether it’s on-the-go access to technology or a better solution for identifying and selecting organizational talent, making significant investments across personal and organizational levels delivers certain advantages. However, if we don’t protect those investments, we risk significant damage or loss.

Come to think of it, maybe I should buy that temporary case after all.

Blaine Gaddis
International Research Manager
Hogan Assessment Systems

The concept of validity is at the core of any personality assessment. There are many approaches to developing a valid assessment, and unfortunately, in an industry with very little regulation, validity varies greatly between providers. From the user’s perspective, validity should be measured simply by the assessment’s ability to accurately predict what the publisher claims it will predict.

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Our clients often request a benchmark against which to evaluate their employees on our personality assessments. A common statement is “we want to see how our sales force compares to other sales forces.” Some are even more specific, such as “we want to benchmark our managers against other managers working in large, pharmaceutical companies in East Asia.” Although we always want to be accommodating, we tend to shy away from creating such benchmarks for multiple reasons. The most important reason is that, devoid of the relevant contextual information, benchmarks using personality assessment are not very useful and can lead to false conclusions.

The desire for benchmarks in personality assessment is likely a product of normal business thinking. As organizations, we are always comparing ourselves to our competition to know where we stand. Stock price, annual revenue, number of products sold, customer retention rate and satisfaction ratings, safety violations, and employee turnover rates. These are all things that indicate a clear winner when we are benchmarking ourselves against our competitors. Relative to other organizations, we want higher stock value, revenue, sales, and customer ratings. We want lower safety violations and employee turnover.

Being better than your competition is not as clear when it comes to personality assessment. The general bias when interpreting personality assessment scores is that higher scores are better. This bias stems from our orientation to other standardized testing; we know that higher scores are generally better when evaluating ourselves on tests of intelligence, aptitude, skills, and abilities. The reality is that there are strengths and shortcomings associated with any score on any scale from most decent personality assessments. No one gets off the hook. Although people who score high on our Ambition scale have more natural drive and goal-orientation than the population, they may not recognize when it is time to let others lead and may be perceived as poor team players. For example, let’s assume that an oil company has requested a personality benchmark for their safety inspectors relative to other safety inspectors. We create this benchmark, present it to the oil company, and they see that their safety inspectors are higher on a scale measuring creativity than other safety inspectors. Higher is better, right? Not really. Safety inspectors shouldn’t be creative. Instead, good safety inspectors should be more practical, less creative…following the letter of the law. In this case, lower scores on the creativity scale would be better.

Another bias is that client organizations (and people, in general) often assume that any comparisons we, as experts, make must be relevant and attended to. When ESPN reports on the average number of water bottles kept on the sidelines by World Cup teams, we assume that this has some bearing on the success of the team, or else why would they have reported it? Naturally, the googlesphere will activate with fans searching to find out how many water bottles their team keeps on the sidelines. Companies could compare themselves on the number of staplers they have but what does that matter as a metric of business performance? Further, is it better to have more or less staplers? When it comes down to it, not all comparisons are meaningful. As it applies to personality assessment, not all personality characteristics are related to performance (relevant) in a given job or industry. How important for job performance is it for a custodian to be sensitive to the feelings of others? It is likely irrelevant, but we can still create a benchmark that compares the interpersonal sensitivity of one school’s custodians to all other school custodians. When we provide this benchmark, the client organization is likely to assume it has relevance, or else why would we have reported it?

We feed into these biases when we provide benchmarks without the necessary contextual framework. When an organization sees their employees’ personality data plotted against an industry/subgroup benchmark, they may make inaccurate inferences because a) we always assume higher is better and b) we assume that all reported comparisons are important. We can create meaningful benchmarks with personality assessment but it takes the right kind of data. If we have sufficient data, we are able to indicate what personality scales have the strongest and most consistent relationships with performance in these jobs; hence, relevance. In addition, we can indicate whether higher, lower, or even moderate scores are better. Obviously, the thinner we slice the world (e.g., marketing coordinators at mid-western hotel chains), the less likely it is that we, or anyone, will have sufficient evidence to reliably indicate predictors of performance and create good benchmarks. Further, such specific benchmarks lack relevance and applicability. Truth be told, there probably isn’t much difference in personality between marketing coordinators at mid-western hotel chains and marketing coordinators in general. With all stated caveats, we can help clients benchmark their employees on characteristics that matter for performance, as long as it is a worthwhile endeavor and we have the data to do it. Even then, we should not be creating stand-alone graphs or tables that simply plot group averages against each other. We must tell the story around and behind the graph or table to focus attention appropriately. Only then can a personality benchmark be meaningful, impactful, and actionable.