The Science of Personality

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.

Because items on personality assessments have no correct or incorrect answers, users must apply norms to interpret scores. Norms exist largely behind the scenes, and aren’t as sexy as other issues. As a result, they receive little attention relative to other issues, and many do not consider their importance. However, norms can determine whether a person gets a job, receives admittance to academic programs, or is deemed clinically “disordered.” These examples show why test takers should care about norms, but why should test users care?

The answer is simple – validity. Put simply, validity concerns the accuracy of assessment-based decisions, or whether the instrument does what it’s designed to do. Because norms inform decisions based on a person’s score, they impact validity. As an example, consider two assessments designed for adult working populations. The only difference between the two instruments is their norms. Norms for one instrument come from an anonymous sample of Internet users. Norms for the other assessment come from working adults sampled based on labor force and demographic estimates. Because both assessments are intended for adult working populations, the validity of decisions based on these assessments depends on how well the scores reflect the intended audience. Here, norms for one assessment give users confidence in making decisions based on an apples-to-apples comparisons; norms for the other do not.

Hogan takes great pride in the quality and continued accuracy of our assessment norms. We continuously monitor our norms, completing incremental updates as necessary. More importantly, we obtain proportionate representation across occupational and demographic categories to make certain that our norms accurately reflect intended audiences. Internationally, we also develop local norms to give our clients and partners confidence that results reflect intended audiences in local populations. Collectively, these efforts ensure that Hogan remains an industry-leader in assessment norming practices.

Blaine Gaddis
International Research Manager
Hogan Assessment Systems

It’s surprisingly easy for busy organizations to overlook the importance of fundamentals, even when it comes to something as critical to reputation and profitability as safety. And safety starts with talent management.

While safety training certainly helps, what organizations need most are employees who think and act safely in the first place. If an organization doesn’t have proper insight into how individuals contribute to the safety climate, even the most extensive program will deliver limited success.

Continue reading the article “Building a Safer Climate Through Talent Management.”

It’s been awhile since we’ve posted something new. We’ve been taking some time to get our bearings and to discuss some new possibilities for this blog space, beginning with some different voices and and expanded content scope.

To kick things off, we’re linking to a recent article on changeboard.com that discusses the use of Hogan assessments in preparing participants for 2009’s Rivers of Ice expedition in Patagonia.

While it’s true that Hogan’s assessment tools were primarily developed for (and are associated with) workplace applications, they’ve proved extremely useful over the years in a variety of “extracurricular” environments ranging from professional athletics to reality television to high adventure.

From the changeboard article Applying the Hogan tests to extreme conditions:

The 2009 Rivers of Ice expedition was the first attempt at an unsupported crossing of the Southern Patagonian Ice Cap by a team of two adventurers, Tarka L´Herpiniere and Katie-Jane Cooper. For many different reasons and on many different levels this was to be the most extreme and challenging expedition for both of them.

As their coach Sarah Fenwick (a Getfeedback Associate) worked with them on tools and techniques to maximise their strengths and minimise the potentially dysfunctional aspects of their personalities that when stressed, tired, cold, hungry, etc. might potentially have eroded the quality of their relationship, or worse, derailed the expedition.

Read more.

The concept of “engagement” has become a hot topic in applied psychology over the past two years. Like competency modeling and personality assessment before it, HR practitioners have forced the academic community to pay attention to engagement—it is not something that the academics discovered on their own.

The concept of engagement was first described by Yale organizational psychologist William Kahn. Kahn suggests that engagement occurs when a person’s identity and job role “exist in [a] dynamic…relation in which a person both drives personal energies into role behaviors and displays the self within the role.” Such role expression “fulfills the human spirit” at work. Kahn defines engagement in terms of four components: (1) Cognitive (the role is consistent with a person’s identity); (2) Emotional (the person likes the role); (3) Physical (the person will work at the role); (4) Existential (the role provides personal meaning).

There are two big reasons engagement matters. The first is “philosophical”; the second is financial. Concerning the first reason, Karl Marx was right—working in modern business organizations is inherently alienating; in many organizations, people must surrender their humanity in return for a paycheck. When people are not free to defect from organizations, their participation in it is inherently alienating, and engagement is a powerful and humane way to resolve the problem of alienation.

Second, the data overwhelmingly indicate that when the morale of a business unit is low, absenteeism, turnover, and theft go up, and productivity and customer satisfaction go down. Conversely, when morale is high, absenteeism, turnover, and theft go down, and productivity and customer satisfaction go up. Morale and engagement are pretty much the same, and there are clear financial consequences associated with high and low engagement. Engagement is the “g” factor in organizational life; it is correlated with (predicts) every important business outcome at the individual and the business unit level.

The concept of engagement has four important implications for management practice. First, there is such a thing as good and bad management; good management creates engagement, bad management destroys it. Second, because engagement is a function of how managers treat their staff, there are no cookie cutter solutions; engagement depends on building relationships with the staff, one person at a time. Third, not all managers can or will do this. And fourth, not all staff members are willing to engage with their managers.

Assuming that an organization decides to pay attention to engagement, assessment will be at the core of any implementation. Assessment can identify managers who are good at building engagement, managers who could build engagement but don’t, and managers who have no talent for building engagement. Assessment can also identify employees who are capable of becoming engaged, and employees who are, by virtue of their basic psychology, constitutionally alienated.

— Robert Hogan

The following is an excerpt from a fascinating (and often humorous) autobiographical piece that Dr. Robert Hogan wrote for the Journal of Personality Assessment in 2006. During the course of the article, Hogan describes his upbringing, his education, and the curiosity and conviction that led to a life-long career as a preeminent personality psychologist.

My parents were from farm families in the Texas panhandle; they moved to Los Angeles during the great depression of the 1930s with little money or prospects. I was born there in 1937. When I started kindergarten, the little girls could already read, and I realized that they knew something I didn’t. They still do.

In 1942, we moved 50 miles east of Los Angeles to the hard scrabble town of Fontana. Henry Kaiser had built a steel mill there and staffed it with ethnic families from the rust belt—tough, no nonsense people with strong religious convictions. Money was always a problem at home, and I was encouraged to start working early—but such is the tradition of farm families who can’t survive without a stern work ethic. I found my first paying job when I was 13 and have continued to work since then.

By the second grade, I was a voracious reader. School, however, was boring, and I was an indifferent and disruptive pupil for several years; I became quite familiar with paddles and principal’s offices. From early childhood, however, I was fascinated by “animal behavior” and spent a lot of time gathering and watching insects and various critters. In the sixth grade, I started a Biology Club and persuaded other kids to bring in specimens—mostly desert reptiles. In high school, I discovered girls, alcohol, and geometry and found them all as interesting as animal behavior but for different reasons.

I began reading evolutionary theory (George Gaylord Simpson), which seemed intuitively correct and thrillingly controversial from the perspective of Christian fundamentalism— which I had abandoned when I was 10. During the summer before the 12th grade, I read Freud’s (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams, and I was hooked. Many of Freud’s claims were implausible, but the idea that the mind can operate outside awareness seemed obvious, and the notion that one could trace errors and mistakes that seemed random back to underlying erotic preoccupations was a revelation. I wanted to be a psychologist and decode the secrets of other people—to what purpose, it wasn’t clear.

It is hard to overstate the importance of the concept of intelligence for applied psychology; intelligence testing may be the most important single contribution psychology has made to larger society. Advocates of intelligence testing provide data showing that IQ predicts virtually every significant life outcome from income and occupational status to life expectancy. Nonetheless, the concept continues to make some of us uncomfortable for three reasons. First, the concept of intelligence is still poorly defined; the default definition is, “intelligence is what intelligence tests test”. Second, all of us know people who have received very high scores on standard IQ measures who nonetheless have trouble functioning in the world. And third, in standardized cognitive assessment, problems are fully defined; in the real world, problems are almost always poorly defined.

The term “intelligent” is a judgment that we use to evaluate performance; for example, in athletics, certain people are known as smart players and others are not. A moment’s reflection suggests that the term “intelligent” mostly applies to decisions—smart decisions precede smart actions and vice versa. Decision making is particularly important in business, politics, and warfare where money and lives are on the line and bad decisions affect the welfare of many people. Decision making is also typically difficult in business, politics, and warfare because there is almost never enough time or information to make a carefully reasoned decision. The term “good judgment” applies to the ability to make sound and defensible decisions with limited time and information.

The book, “Why Smart Executives Fail” by Sydney Finkelstein (2003), contains a large number of richly detailed case studies of failed business enterprises and is a superb data base for thinking about good (and bad) judgment. At the surface level, businesses fail for a variety of reasons—technology shifts, new competitors, ill-advised acquisitions—but at a deeper level, bad judgment appears to be the cause of the problem in every case. And in every case, the bad judgment was exercised in two stages. In the first stage, the company’s CEO chose the wrong means to accomplish a desired end. In the second stage, the CEO stayed with his/her choice despite information that the choice was a bad one.

For example, in the 1980s, General Motors (GM), the world’s largest automobile manufacturer, faced two looming problems. The first was competition from low cost, high quality Japanese cars. The second was labor unrest at home. The CEO of GM, Roger Smith, decided he could solve both problems by replacing his workers with robots. He invested more than $45 billion in robots—enough to buy both Toyota and Nissan—but the investment failed because the key to the Japanese success was the manner in which they integrated their technology with their workforce, rather than their robotic technology per se. As one industry insider noted, by using technology without the prepared workforce, all Roger Smith did was automate confusion. However, he persisted in his decision, and GM’s productivity continued to decline relative to Toyota.

Again, bad judgment is a two stage process. In the first stage, a person chooses the wrong means to get to the desired end. In the second stage, a person persists with the choice despite evidence that it was wrong. For persons familiar with the structure of the Hogan Business Reasoning Inventory (HBRI), choosing the wrong means to get to a desired end is a failure in Strategic Reasoning, while persisting in a bad choice after data are available is a failure of Tactical Reasoning.

At Hogan, we believe that leadership is the most important problem in management science. When good leaders are in place, organizations and their members prosper, when bad leaders are in place, organizations and their members suffer. At the same time, the academic study of leadership has largely failed to deliver any real-world generalizations about leadership or recommendations regarding how to find it or develop it. The academic study of leadership has failed for three reasons: (1) Leadership is poorly defined; (2) Mainstream literature ignores personality; (3) Nobody pays attention to return on investment (ROI).

Let’s consider these points in turn.

The Definition of Leadership.
Leadership is defined in academic literature primarily in terms of the people who are in charge. The assumption is, if a person is a manager, president or CEO, he/she is by definition a leader. This is a big mistake for at least two reasons. First, ask yourself how a person rises in a large, hierarchical, bureaucratic, male-dominated organization. The answer is, by playing politics, not by exercising leadership. It was said of Dwight Eisenhower, “He didn’t become a politician because he was a general, he became a general because he was a politician.” People typically rise in large organizations by pleasing their superiors with their loyalty and technical knowledge, not by displaying leadership skills. Second, the base rate of failure for managers in America is about 65%; thus, 65% of the people in “leadership” positions today will fail in one way or another. To the degree that leadership is defined in terms of who is in charge, the research won’t lead to replicable conclusions—because success in any organization is idiosyncratic. Who wins in such pursuits will largely depend on the circumstances—the nature of the competition, the team of judges, the climate of the times, etc.

Situations versus Personality.
Most major organizations in the United States, public or private, military or civilian, assume that almost anyone can be (or can learn to be) a leader, and will perform appropriately when put in charge of other people. People are promoted based on time in service and technical talent, with no consideration given to the possibility that some people have more talent for leadership than others. Sometimes this assumption is based on intellectual laziness, but among psychologists the assumption reflects the lingering effects of behaviorism and situationism—the view that what people do depends on where they are not who they are. However, the average person understands that some people perform better in leadership positions than others, and the reason has to do with the kinds of persons they are—i.e., their personalities.

ROI-based Research.
Most managers are evaluated by their bosses—the people who hired or promoted them and who have a vested interest in their doing well. But many bad managers are skilled at pleasing their bosses, which drives the bosses’ evaluations. It seems obvious to us that managers ought to be evaluated in terms of the performance of the group that they manage. Although this is rarely done, it is easy to do, and when done correctly, it turns out that effective managers have a distinctive personality style which varies systematically with the industry and their level in their organization. We discuss this in more detail below.

The remainder of this discussion is organized in six parts. We define personality, we define leadership, then we show how personality impacts leadership, and how leadership (properly defined) impacts business unit performance. We then analyze the crucial role of followers for business unit performance, and how to enhance their engagement.

1. Defining Personality.
We believe that personality is related to leadership—who you are determines how you lead. But we need to define personality, and it should be defined from two perspectives: how a person thinks about him/herself and how others think about that person. We refer to this as the actor’s and the observer’s perspectives on personality, and it is important to keep them distinct. The actor’s perspective is a person’s identity, the story that he/she tells others about him/herself—it is an idealized self view. Although identity has been the major focus of personality research from Freud to the present, it has been a non-productive focus. After 150 years of research, there are no reliable generalizations to report, there is no measurement base, there is no taxonomy to organize the subject matter. How people think about themselves is almost impossible to study in a rigorous way; hence that study has led to no conclusions.

On the other hand, personality from the observer’s perspective—a person’s reputation—is easy to study and leads to some very useful generalizations. First, unlike identity, reputation is quite stable over time. Second, reputation has a well recognized taxonomy—it is called the Five-Factor Model (sometimes “the Big Five”). Everyone’s reputation can be described in terms of five dimensions: (1) Anxious vs. Confident; (2) Shy vs. Assertive; (3) Tough vs. Charming; (4) Careless vs. Conscientous; and (5) Narrow- minded vs. Open-minded. And third, these five dimensions predict a wide range of performance outcomes, including leadership, better than measures of cognitive ability. There is almost complete consensus in the research community that personality should be defined in terms of these five (large) dimensions, with finer distinctions within the five being possible and useful.

2. Defining Leadership.
Conventional leadership literature focuses on charismatic or transformational leadership, and this focus has led to few reliable generalizations. We prefer a functional definition—because leadership has a job to do. The leader’s job is to persuade otherwise selfish people to work together for a period of time to accomplish a common objective. Thus we define leadership in terms of the ability to build and maintain a high performing team, and we think leadership should be evaluated in terms of the performance of the team, relative to the competition. Defining leadership this way has two useful consequences. On the one hand, the research literature becomes interpretable. On the other hand, this definition brings the issue of ROI into focus.

3. Personality and Leadership.
We have now defined personality (as reputation) and leadership (as the ability to build a team). The next question concerns the links between personality and leadership. (We should note that, as recently as 1990, academic researchers maintained that this question was nonsense—because leadership was deemed to be a function of “the situation”—e.g., situational leadership.) In 2002, Tim Judge, a researcher at the University of Florida, published a landmark study. Using 20,000 managers from 5,000 organizations, representing every industry sector, he showed that personality, defined in terms of the Five-Factor Model, predicts rated leadership performance very substantially, and much better than measures of cognitive ability. For those of us who believe in data, this seals the case—personality and leadership are rather tightly connected. Good managers are Confident, Assertive, Conscientious, Open-minded, and not necessarily Charming.

4. Leadership and Business Unit Performance.
In 2002, James Harter, Frank Schmidt, and Ted Hayes, three researchers funded by Gallup, published another landmark study that shows three things. First, the personality of the manager impacts the morale of the work group. Second, when morale is up, good business results follow; when morale is down, bad results follow. And third, the link between the manager’s personality and business unit performance is mediated by staff morale. This means that leadership is indirectly, and staff morale is directly, connected to ROI.

5. Understanding the Role of the Follower.
Leadership involves getting results through other people—it is not about the charisma of individual leaders, it is about persuading followers to adopt the leader’s agenda. Work is a (sometimes painful) extension of everyday life. Personality psychology tells us that people have three overriding needs that govern their lives: (1) People need acceptance and respect, and they dread criticism and rejection; (2) People need status and the control of resources, and dread the loss of status and resources; (3) And people need structure and predictability in their lives, and find the lack of structure to be stressful. These needs are operating at work, during interaction with peers and management. Thus, good managers provide their staff with respect, allow them to control their own work, and make sense out of business activities. Bad managers do the opposite, and are unable to build a team.

6. The Lessons of Engagement.
Engagement is the central factor underlying employee performance in modern business, and it is almost entirely a function of leadership. Senior leadership needs to establish a culture that recognizes, values, and facilitates engagement. First line supervisors and managers need to treat their employees in ways that minimally don’t actively alienate them, and ideally in ways that encourage engagement. But there is no cookie cutter approach to this. Rather, encouraging engagement puts specific demands on individual leaders, who must establish and maintain working relationships with their employees, one employee at a time. Some people are better able to do this than others, such people can be identified by their personality signature, and to the degree that organizations value ROI, they will pay attention to this research-based conclusion.

— Dr. Robert Hogan

A small number of psychologists, economists, and management theorists have been enthusiastically trying to determine how modern evolutionary theory can be used to understand the dynamics of organizations. Traditional evolutionary theory—the survival of the fittest model—supports selfishness, predatory capitalism, and the importance of individual self-interest. However, some economists have begun to test people using variants of competitive games (of which the Prisoner’s Dilemma is the best known). This research has led to two important findings.

First, the strategies that people use in these competitive bargaining games fall into three robust and replicable categories. About 15% of every population consists of altruists—people whose first instinct is to cooperate, to extend benefits to others, to work for the common good. About 20% of every population consists of free riders—people whose first instinct is to take advantage of other people, act selfishly, and contribute nothing to the common good. And finally, about 65% of every population consists of people who tailor their actions to those of the other person—they will cooperate when others cooperate, and compete when others compete. Second, these data show quite clearly that the selfishness model proposed by traditional evolutionary theory is wrong, it does not characterize the behavior of most people.

The new thinking argues that traditional evolutionary theory needs to be augmented with insights from: (1) multi-level selection; and (2) gene-culture co-evolution theory. Putting the three lines of analysis together tells us that people evolved as group living animals, and that the groups competed with one another for scarce resources. This, in turn, leads to several interesting insights regarding organizational dynamics. The first insight is that the percentages of altruists, free riders/cheaters, and switch hitters described above are about what we should expect to find in any normal population.

The second insight is that people are best understood in terms of their relations to the other members of their groups. Thus, although traditional psychoanalysis and psychology has focused on isolated individuals and how they deal with their private demons, this has been a big mistake because what is inside, in people’s psyches, started outside in their relations with others.

Third, human evolutionary history has designed people so that they are pre-programmed in two main ways. On the one hand, they are from birth ready to compete with the other members of their group for status and resources. On the other hand, they will cooperate with the other members of their group when faced with external competition. Thus people live in a state of internal tension and must learn to balance their desires to compete with others against their needs for the support of others.

Fourth, every human group is faced with two unavoidable problems. On the one hand, there is a strong tendency for “leaders” to exploit their groups for their own selfish purposes, and subordinate group members must maintain a watchful eye to avoid being exploited. On the other hand, there is a strong tendency for the members of any one group to begin fighting with their neighboring groups. Thus, organizations that are composed of several groups will compete with one another based on the degree to which they can persuade their constituent groups to stop the internal fighting. Think, for example, of the two major U.S. political parties.

Finally, then, good leadership is a resource for the group rather than a source of privilege for the leader(s). Good leadership is able to: (1) persuade the subordinate group members that the leadership won’t exploit them; and (2) persuade the subordinate group members to stop fighting with one another and concentrate on the competition.

— Robert Hogan