Tag: no post tags

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… 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… Read more »

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… Read more »

  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… Read more »

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… Read more »

From the beginning of personality psychology as an academic discipline in the 1930s, the conventional wisdom has maintained that reputation is an epiphenomenon of no real psychological significance or interest. Instead, according to Gordon Allport, personality psychology concerns the factors that make each person distinctive and unique. This was a mistake for two reasons: (1)… Read more »

In 1982 I undertook a self-taught crash course in I/O psychology, with a special emphasis on leadership. At that time, I concluded that LMX theory was the only model of leadership that made any sense; the alternatives seemed hopelessly academic. I have recently had the opportunity to meet George Graen, the author of LMX theory… Read more »

About 10 years ago, academic researchers rediscovered personality and its relationship to job performance. More recently, after the events symbolized by the collapse of Enron and MCI, the business community seems to have rediscovered the importance of character as a determinant of job performance—especially in the senior ranks. These represent different insights in the popular… Read more »

The talented and charismatic Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach published Psychodiagnostik in 1921. Rorschach’s inkblots soon attracted a cult-like following and became the most widely used projective test in the world. The theory behind projective tests is that, when people are asked to describe an ambiguous stimulus, their descriptions will reveal their private thoughts and fantasies—a… Read more »

Every significant piece of public policy, every important generalization in history, economics, political science, and sociology depends on (largely unevaluated) assumptions about human nature. Personality psychology concerns the nature of human nature; it is, therefore, concerned with one of the most powerful and dangerous forces on earth. Developing adequate methods for conceptualizing human nature and… Read more »