Every year, the SIOP Executive Board presents the Hogan Award for Personality and Work Performance. This award, named after Hogan Assessment Systems founders’ Drs. Robert and Joyce Hogan, recognizes the academic paper or chapter that has the highest potential to further the understanding of personality as it relates to work performance. This year’s Hogan Award recipients are In-Sue Oh, Temple University, Gang Wang, University of Idaho, and Michael K. Mount, University of Iowa, for their article, "Validity of Observer Ratings of the Five-Factor Model of Personality Traits: A Meta-Analysis," published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, volume 96.

In their winning article, Drs. Oh, Gang and Mount's meta-analytic approach to the relationship between personality traits and job performance reveals insightful conclusions about the validity of observer ratings of Five-Factor Model (FFM) traits versus the validity estimates based on self-report measures of FFM traits. Their results show that observer ratings of personality traits in regards to job performance have a higher validity than those based on self-report ratings – in other words, our co-workers know us better than we know ourselves when it comes to how we approach work.

Drs. Oh, Gang, and Mount’s paper originally stemmed from Dr. Mount’s popular 1994 article focused on the validity of observer ratings of personality factors of sales representatives. Drs. Oh, Gang and Mount expanded the study to include multiple job functions and found that personality is even more predictive of job performance than previously believed. "Our results underscore the importance of disentangling the validity of personality traits from the method of measurement of the traits," the authors stated in their article.

 “In-Sue, Gang and I feel very fortunate to have received this award. Joyce and Bob Hogan are very rare among I-O Psychologists because they have had a major impact on both the science and practice of I-O Psychology,” says Dr. Mount. As illustrated in the References section of their paper, the Hogan’s extensive research and literature on personality measurement has helped to make meta-analytical research, such as this, possible.

They may like it, but extroverted people are less likely to put a ring on it.

Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Hogan’s vice president of research and innovation, and his colleagues surveyed more than 16,000 people to examine how personality influences relationship style. They found that extroverted people tend to be more passionate in their relationships, where conscientious people tend to favor intimacy and commitment. Agreeable individuals tend to be intimate, committed, and passionate.

They also found that two out of three relationship styles were significantly related to how long a relationship lasted. People with a committed relationship style tended to have longer-lasting relationships, where passionate relationship style was negatively related to relationship length. That is, if you tend to be more passionate, your relationship is likely to end more quickly.

Find out how else your personality is affecting your love life.

Did you know your personality could be slimming?

In a 2010 article in the Journal of Social Psychology, Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, vice president of research and innovation at Hogan, and colleagues examined the influence of personality information on men’s ratings of the physical attractiveness of photographs of women varying in body size from emaciated to obese.

Their results showed that personality information had a significant effect on the range of body sizes that participants judged to be physically attractive. Providing positive personality information resulted in participants rating a wider range of figures as attractive compared with the control group. Negative personality information resulted in a constricted range of figures being rated as attractive.

How else is your personality affecting your love life?

Although it sounds like the plot from dozens of bad romantic comedies, recent research suggests that who you are on the inside (your personality) is more important than how you look when it comes to catching the eye of that special someone.

Hogan recently asked 1,177 participants what was most important in a romantic partner: physical attractiveness, personal style, earning potential, education, social status, or personality.

Respondents were 40.3% male and 59.7% female.

82.1% said personality was most important in a partner
5.5% said personal style
4.9% said physical attractiveness

Want to know what else we found out?

Drs. Joyce and Robert Hogan were among the first voices to advocate personality assessment as a valid predictor of workplace performance. Twenty-five years later, Hogan is the leading provider of personality assessments.

This is our story.

When thinking about personality, one thing that we know is there is no such thing as a good or bad personality. It really depends on the job and situation. This is a point that we regularly emphasize to individuals and organizations. Along these same lines, we know that high scores on personality assessments do not inherently mean good things, and low scores do not always mean bad things – there are positives and negatives to both ends of the continuum. Having stated that, our scores do represent our reputations. Over the course of time people come to expect certain behaviors from us based on our past performances.

One of the main goals of personality assessment is to provide individuals with strategic self-awareness. Through feedback, we can help the individual understand his or her tendencies and reputation in the work environment. As such, we can help the low Prudence individual understand that others view him or her as being impulsive and lacking attention to detail, or aid the high Prudence individual with recognizing that he or she may be somewhat inflexible and resistant to change. Having stated that, we are not out to change personality, rather we are looking to make people more aware of their tendencies so they can change their behavior moving forward.

Nevertheless, change is a difficult and ongoing process. To illustrate this point, take a minute to write a few sentences using your opposite hand (i.e., your right hand if you are left-handed and vice-versa). At first, it’s a challenging and awkward thing to do. However, with practice this behavior will become easier to execute. This analogy represents what we are trying to accomplish with feedback and coaching. We should not be trying to convert lefties to righties, and the same is true with personality. We are not trying to convert the low Prudence to high Prudence (or vice-versa), rather we are aiming to help individuals understand their strengths and shortcomings of what their scores represent, and provide developmental tips to leverage these strengths and mitigate these shortcomings.

So, the next time you are confronted with a challenging situation, don’t throw up a white flag and hide behind your personality scores. If you’re low Prudence and the project requires attention to detail, or are high Prudence and the project demands flexibility and openness to change, don’t allow your personality to be a barrier to your success. Instead, take some time to reflect on your natural response tendencies and decide if this is the most advantageous response option given the situation, or if a different course of action would be more beneficial. Through persistence and ongoing coaching, we can learn to overcome the dark side of our personality and let the bright side shine.

Say you apply for a job. You take an assessment to see if you’re the right fit for the company and the role. After you join the company, you take another assessment to gauge your managerial skills. Later you may be part of a team-building exercise, which requires an entirely different assessment. Pretty soon, you’re feeling like this: 

According to senior consultant Dr. Kevin Meyer, a lot of companies are dealing with assessment overkill.

“Over time, they’ve adopted specific assessment tools for specific needs,” he said. “In theory, it’s a good approach, but when you use different tools there’s no common framework for a company to use to understand and evaluate its employees.”

Our comprehensive approach to personality assessment provides the depth and detail companies need to hire the right people, identify and develop talented individuals, build better leaders, and improve their bottom line. And because personality is stable over time, our assessments are a useful tool throughout the employee lifecycle.

To learn more, check out this video interview, or read our new eBook, Why Personality?

Assessments are powerful, business-critical tools that predict and monitor employee performance and multiple assessments are administered based on the different needs within the organization. Over the course of a typical year, some employees might be assessed and reassessed over and over again, causing frustration and assessment burnout for already busy employees. When organizations use multiple assessments that have no or limited correlation to each other, it also creates a glut of data that forms its very own black hole, sucking in all the information – full of redundancies – including the vital insights.

Since the variance between these assessment tools is often slight, organizations risk capturing virtually the same data in different systems that are further limiting because they are unable to talk to each other. Organization-wide, collected data filters into this black hole ensuring it is nearly impossible to compare results or pull broad-spectrum reports. As more assessments are ordered to suit emerging needs, employees and human resources professionals become frustrated. To avoid burnout and black hole syndrome, finding an alternative is imperative.

Research indicates that the solution may be easier than you realize: employ a comprehensive suite of assessment tools. Here’s how:

One Suite, Multiple Options Having a comprehensive suite allows the organization to assess employees once, using the same questions for everyone. With this concise data in hand, the organization can run multiple reports on everything from detecting leadership potential to recognizing levels of accident proneness.

Creating Consistency Collecting the same information about all employees provides a broad, deep understanding of the entire workforce.

Implementing Strategy This starts by identifying the organization’s needs (PDF) including the biggest pain point; once needs are determined a comprehensive assessment suite can be rolled out. We recommend holding a “conversion” training to help employees understand the new approach and its associated value for improving the HR lifecycle and employee experience. 

With a comprehensive assessments suite in place, organizations will see burnout diminish while the black hole gives way to a viable bank of employee data. To find out more about using a comprehensive suite of assessments, download our latest eBook, Why Personality?

I recently listened to a “This American Life” podcast in which the host, Ira Glass, posed fundamental questions about what kids should learn in school and what really matters when it comes to success later in life.

During the show, James Heckman (a Nobel Prize winning economist) argued that qualities other than IQ (i.e., personality characteristics) are equally important in predicting who will be successful in life and who won’t. Heckman became a huge proponent of this viewpoint, bringing together neuroscientists, economists, educators, and psychologists each year to discuss these ideas, after conducting a study that convinced him IQ wasn’t all that mattered.

In this study, Heckman looked at three groups of students:
1. Those who graduated high school
2. Those who dropped out but obtained a GED
3. Those who dropped out and did not obtain a GED.
He followed these people into adulthood for many years to see how successful they were in life. Did they land and hold jobs? How much money did they make? Did they stay out of prison? Did they divorce?

He reasoned that since the GED was equivalent to a high school diploma, those with GEDs should be as smart as high school graduates. If IQ was all that mattered, he predicted the two groups would be equally successful in life. He wasn’t sure how the drop-outs would end up since their intelligence was unknown.

Heckman found that those who had earned their GED performed slightly better than drop-outs, which isn’t too surprising. However, what did surprise Heckman was that those with GEDs didn’t achieve anywhere close to the same success as the high school graduates (in terms of earnings, job performance, college success, etc.).

The study’s findings led Heckman to conclude that cognitive skills, (i.e., IQ) are only one piece of the puzzle. Scores on standardized tests like the GED and ACT that measure IQ can only explain a small fraction of whether or not someone is successful. Other “non-cognitive skills,” like personality characteristics, play a large part in predicting success both personally and professionally.

His conclusion makes sense when you think about it. How resilient or tenacious you are, how you relate to and communicate with others, or how goal-oriented and organized you are should influence how well you do in life. As Dr. Hogan once quoted in the blog, “Character is fate.”

This past weekend, I made an impromptu trip to Kansas City to be with my grandmother in the hospital after a heart attack. Thankfully, the doctors are confident that the damage can be treated quickly and she may be able to return home soon.

During the time I spent with grandmother before returning back to Tulsa, we got to know the nurses and nursing assistants quite well and I couldn’t help but pay close attention to their every move. This is my grandmother, after all, and given the circumstances, my high Skeptical tendencies were out in full force. While we were very pleased with the majority of the staff, there were two nursing assistants that left a more lasting impression. 

First, there was nursing assistant A, let’s call her Nancy. During her 12-hour shift, Nancy performed all tasks very well (i.e., administering medication, assisting the patient with bathing, assessing the patient’s vitals and documenting them with the nurse). However, the positive impression Nancy left with us was not due to her technical skills alone. Nancy was upbeat, attentive, friendly, and understanding. She checked in on my grandmother frequently, brought her extra ice cream after room service was closed, and cracked jokes to lighten the mood. Without a doubt, Nancy made the hospital stay easier on my grandmother (and us).

Then, there was nursing assistant B, let’s call her Anita. Anita was from the hospital’s radiology department and transported my grandmother from her room to the lab for testing. Although Anita performed her primary task, she caused us all to be concerned with her interest and capabilities for doing so. As an example, Anita first approached my grandmother’s bed, asking her “Are you going down for X-rays now? I think that’s where you’re going”, while grabbing a piece of paper from her pocket to check the order. She failed to make any attempt to make my grandmother comfortable as she moved from her hospital bed to the gurney and when the R.N. asked Anita if there was an oxygen tank attached to the gurney, Anita glanced at the bed from several feet away and responded “Yeah, it looks like there is a tank.” It was apparent that Anita lacked the confidence, interpersonal skills, and motivators necessary for the role. 

This is another example of the importance of personality fit within a role. My colleagues Ryan Daly and Cheryl Dunlap shared stories of a rewarding and disappointing experience with organizations and our observations all share one common, albeit basic, theme: employing the right or wrong people for the job will leave a lasting impression on your customers.