At Hogan, we work with organizations every day to help them identify effective leaders using a data-driven approach leveraging the predictive power of our personality assessments. To ensure our services are the best in the business, we have spent decades studying successful and failed leaders. Our data show that three psychological factors have a profound… Read more »
Popular wisdom will have you believe that a leader is someone who exudes confidence and charisma because they appear smart, interesting, and engaging. However, more often than not, these types of leaders wreak havoc on the workplace. A growing body of research suggests that humility is a far more important quality in a leader than… Read more »
The existing paradigm in the business world holds that successful CEOs are ambitious, result-oriented, individualistic, and, above all, charismatic. The rise of agency theory, or the notion that incentivizing managers should improve shareholder returns, put greater emphasis on the need to hire leaders that appear leader-like. Unfortunately, conventional wisdom of what a leader looks like… Read more »
*This post was authored by Robert Hogan & Ryne Sherman. There is a fascinating connection between two seemingly unrelated topics: self-deception and leadership. The two themes often come together in the lives of prominent politicians, for example, in the career of Barack Obama. Let us explain. We are both fascinated by the idea that people… Read more »
*This article was originally published by Training Industry on May 1, 2018. One of the best studies ever conducted on organizational effectiveness was done by Jim Collins and described in his book “Good to Great.” Collins identified 11 firms from the Fortune 1000 that had 15 years of below-average performance in their industry followed by… Read more »
“This porridge is too hot!” “This porridge is too cold.” “Ahhh, this porridge is just right.” –Goldilocks At Hogan, we’ve been talking a lot about Humility lately. We’ve spent much less time talking about its antonym – Charisma. However, colleagues have used the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) to study charisma and recently published their findings… Read more »
*This is a guest blog post written by Nicholas Emler, Ph.D., a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Surrey. Leadership was for too long grievously neglected by mainstream psychology, so it is good to see the topic more regularly getting serious scholarly attention; there is now a substantial body of informative research, in… Read more »
When organizations are working to identify new leaders, too often they gravitate toward those who are charismatic, narcissistic, and inappropriately self-confident. These individuals tend to emerge because they are well-liked and masters in the art of office politics. However, decades of data and research prove that people with these characteristics are extremely ineffective leaders, and… Read more »
Conventional wisdom suggests that the most charismatic leaders are also the best leaders. Charismatic leaders have, for instance, the ability to inspire others toward higher levels of performance and to instill deep levels of commitment, trust, and satisfaction. As a result, they are generally perceived by their subordinates to be more effective, compared with less charismatic leaders. But our research shows that… Read more »
When it comes to who we want to work for, everyone thinks they want the same thing: a charismatic leader whose engaging personality and sweeping oratory inspires his or her followers to greatness, like every coach in every sports movie ever made, ever. Including this one by Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday.