Few would expect to hear the death knoll at work, but 80% of people name their job as the main source of stress – an emotional state of tension that can have long-term negative effects on health.

Studies show that chronic stress can increase people’s chances of experiencing a diagnosable mental or emotional disorder, suffering from depression and anxiety, and having panic attacks.

And it’s not just psychological. Chronic stress is also linked to increases in metabolic syndrome, a collection of signs and symptoms – obesity, high blood pressure, and a larger waist size – that increase the risk of heart disease. Three out of four doctor’s visits are for stress-related ailments or complaints!

Work-related stress can also have an effect on family life. Men and women with greater amounts of stress were more reactive to the normal ups and downs of relationships. Alcohol consumption also has a positive correlation with amount of stress an adult takes home.

All of this could easily be avoided – at least 75% of people said the most stressful aspect of their job is their immediate boss. Find out how your leadership and employees could benefit from a closer examination of work-related stressors in our ebook Stress is Killing You.

Patient safety is a major concern for the medical industry. Although hospitals have advanced systems to monitor and improve patient safety, they largely ignore one of the largest drivers of patient safety: emotional intelligence.

In the sixth installment of our video series, Drinks with Hogan, Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Hogan’s vice president of research and innovation, and HR iconoclast William Tincup discuss what to do with bad managers.

This workshop provides a comprehensive tutorial on three Hogan inventories – Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI); Hogan Development Survey (HDS); and Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI). Participants attending both days and successfully completing the workshop will be certified to use the Hogan inventories.

The workshop includes all materials, continental breakfasts, lunches, and snacks. Hogan has contracted with the Hyatt Regency Denver Tech Center for a group rate of $153 per night. When booking your accommodations, ask for Hogan’s corporate rate. Please book your room quickly, as it expires July 14, 2014 or when the block is filled.

Register today for the Hogan Assessment Certification Workshop. The workshop has restricted seating to ensure a high-quality learning environment.

This program has been approved for 13 (General) recertification credit hours toward PHR, SPHR, ad GPHR recertification through the HR Certification Institute. This program has also been approved by the International Coach Federation for 13 Continuing Education units.

Extensive research highlights the importance of work engagement – employees’ morale and involvement with work – as determinant of individual and organizational performance. Large-scale studies show that engagement is positively correlated with a wide range of important business outcomes, such as organizational commitment, citizenship, innovation, and team performance, and negatively correlated with turnover intentions, strain, and burnout (Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001; Seibert, Wang, & Courtright, 2011). Furthermore, meta-analytic evidence indicates that higher engagement levels are directly translated into higher business revenues and profits (Harter et al, 2009). These findings have prompted organizations to monitor engagement levels via regular employee surveys. According to Gallup, who surveys millions of employees every year, only 30% of Americans are engaged at work, and the most common reason for disengagement is employees’ direct boss or line manager. Thus leadership is a critical antecedent of engagement (Wollard & Shuck, 2011).

Leadership is typically defined as the ability to build and maintain high-performing teams (Hogan, 2007). As engagement is a key driver of individual-, team-, and unit-level performance, it has been argued that leaders influence organizational effectiveness by engaging employees, or failing to do so (Schaufeli & Salanova, 2007). Meta-analyses suggest that leadership effectiveness increases employees’ job satisfaction and commitment (Dumdum, Lowe, & Avolio, 2002; Fuller, Patterson, Hester, & Stringer, 1996; Lowe, Kroeck, & Sivasubramaniam, 1996), while independent studies report strong correlations between transformational leadership and employee engagement (Zhu, Avolio, & Walumbwa, 2009), where engagement mediates the relationship between transformational leadership and subordinates’ turnover intentions (Wefaltd et al, 2011). Although these findings support the idea that leadership is a major cause of employee engagement, an important unaddressed questions remains, namely what causes performance differences in leadership?

To this end, this symposium includes four integrated presentations that highlight the role of leaders’ personality as determinant of subordinates’ engagement levels and discuss how this knowledge can be translated into actionable organizational recommendations.

First, SIOP Fellow Robert Hogan, who pioneered the use of personality assessments in organizational settings, presents a causal model for understanding the relationship between personality, leadership, and engagement. This model posits that personality characteristics drive individual differences in leadership effectiveness because they impact on employee engagement.

Then, Justin Black, Strategic Advisor at Sirota Survey Intelligence, puts Hogan’s model to the test by examining longitudinal effects of managers’ personality on their direct reports’ engagement in a multinational technology firm. Results highlight causal paths between managers’ reputation – how others’ evaluate them – and subordinates’ engagement: prudent and empathic managers engage; passive-aggressive and volatile managers disengage.

Next, Christine Fernandez, Director of Organizational Effectiveness at Starwood, discusses linkages between CEO’s competencies, employee engagement, and customer satisfaction in 398 worldwide hotels. Results show strong associations between CEOs interpersonal skills, multisource feedback, employee engagement, and guest loyalty, as well as providing a detailed account on the personality of successful hotel CEOs.

The final presentation, by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Professor of I-O Psychology at University College London and VP of Innovation at Hogan, examines the role of managers’ and employees’ emotional intelligence as determinant of employee engagement and job performance in a large retail chain, integrating both top-down and bottom-up perspectives on engagement.

This symposium will be held Thursday, May 15.

References available

Dr. Robert Hogan spent his career working to prove that personality predicts workplace performance and helps businesses dramatically reduce turnover and increase productivity by hiring the right people, developing key talent, and evaluating leadership potential. Here, he discusses what role personality plays at work.

What role does personality play in an employee’s performance at work?

An overwhelming amount of data support the claim that WELL VALIDATED personality measures predict job performance better than any other known evaluation method, including interviews and IQ tests.  But unlike interviews and IQ tests, well validated personality measures do not discriminate against women, minorities, or older people.   In addition, an overwhelming amount of data support the claim that, when employers use well validated personality measures to hire employees, they make more money because they hire more productive employees, reduce turnover, absenteeism, and shrinkage, and increase productivity and customer satisfaction.

How much of a factor should personality be when an employer is considering who to hire, fire and/or promote?

Using well validated personality measures to hire, fire, and promote employees has two advantages.  First, the decisions will be objective—often they are politically biased.  Second, the decisions will be based on data and not personal intuition.  Persuading business to make personnel decisions based on empirically defensible methods is, curiously, a hard sell.  To answer your question directly, personality should be the major single factor used to make personnel decisions—if you believe in data.

Are there any specific personality types that employers should avoid hiring?

Employers should avoid hiring “team killers”—highly talented people who also destroy morale, by quarreling with subordinates, complaining, testing the limits, and performing erratically.  Such people are hired because they are smart and attractive, and seem to have a lot of potential.  Employers give them a lot of slack because they are so obviously talented, but over time, their negative impact on the rest of the team cripples the performance of the entire group.  This is a well-known phenomena in athletics, hence the term “team killer”.

Are there any specific personality types that are more likely to earn a promotion?

People who are more  likely to earn promotions are called high potentials in contemporary HR parlance.  Vast amounts of empirical data support the view that high potentials are characterized by three personality attributes.  First, they are pleasant, charming, and rewarding to deal with; clients, colleagues, and bosses all like them.  Second, they are smart enough to learn the job quickly.  And third, they are willing to do the job—the come to work regularly and work hard while there.  We call this the “RAW model”, where RAW stands for:  (1) Rewarding (to deal with); (2) Able (to learn the job); and (3) Willing (to do the job).   

Hosted by Compass Consulting, one of Hogan’s network of partners and distributors, the two-day Spanish-language certification workshop will take place from Tuesday, May 20, through Wednesday, May 21, 2014, at the Kovens Convention Center in Miami. Participants will learn to use three Hogan inventories:

• The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI), which evaluates personality characteristics that people need to ensure job fit and a successful career path.
• The Hogan Development Survey (HDS), which identifies interpersonal behaviors that can impede career success.
• The Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI), which assesses business drivers and core values to determine a person’s individual fit within a corporate culture.

Workshop participants will conduct detailed interpretation and analysis of assessment results and give comprehensive feedback on the HPI, HDS and MVPI inventories in group and individual settings. They will also learn best practices concerning assessment use and interpretation.

Participants attending both days and successfully completing the workshop will be certified to use the Hogan inventories. Additionally for HR professionals, the program has been approved for 13 (general) credit hours toward PHR, SPHR, and GPHR recertification through the HR Certification Institute. The workshop has also been approved by the International Coach Federation for 13 Continuing Coaching Education units.

For more information, download the workshop brochure, or to register, contact Compass Consulting at contacto@compasslatam.com. There is a 10 percent discount for those registering two or more participants.

As the pace of innovation increases, so does the need to test innovations to determine their worth.  Items enhancing quality of life are widely adopted.  For example, software such as SAS and SPSS allow us to instantly run analyses that would have previously taken days or weeks.  More recently, online data collection has replaced paper-and-pencil data collection and manual entry (Horton, Rand, & Zeckhauser, 2010).  Similarly, websites like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) may allow quick and inexpensive access to hundreds of thousands of participants, but a critical review is needed to determine its worth as an innovative data collection resource.

MTurk is an example of a crowdsourcing website where researchers outsource data collection to online participants rather than using laboratory and other samples (Chandler, Mueller, & Paolacci, in press).  Websites such as Crowd Cloud and Crowd Flower also facilitate crowdsourcing (Gaggioli & Riva, 2008), but we focus on MTurk because it is currently the dominant crowdsourcing application for social scientists.  In fact, research conducted using MTurk has already appeared in peer-reviewed journals (Holden, Dennie, & Hicks, 2013; Jonason, Luevano, & Adams, 2012; Jones & Paulhus, 2011).

Using MTurk, participants called “workers” browse Human Intelligence Tasks (“HITs”) posted by “requesters” conducting research.  After selecting and completing HITs, workers are paid a pre-determined fee.  Because MTurk offers access to a large and diverse pool of over 500,000 participants from over 190 countries, researchers’ interest in MTurk as a potential new data collection resource is understandable (Bohannon, 2011; Mason & Suri, 2011).

The goal of this symposium is to bring professionals together to conduct a critical review of MTurk as an avenue for conducting psychological research.  Before turning our session over to our discussant, presenters will share data to evaluate MTurk against other samples.

The Gaddis and Foster paper uses MTurk to test items for developing and maintaining assessments.  The authors compare MTurk data to samples of students as well as applicants and incumbents from organizations.  This paper also includes lessons learned and recommendations for professionals interested in using MTurk.

The Harms and DeSimone paper explores a data cleaning approach to assessing the quality of MTurk data.  Using seven statistical data screens, the authors investigate the prevalence of low-quality data in a large sample of MTurk data.  Results from this paper differ with those from the existing research literature.

The Woolsey and Jones paper recounts a first-time user’s experience using MTurk to conduct international research.  The authors detail practical, methodological, and ethical issues they encountered using MTurk to collect data in the U.S. and Japan.  The paper concludes with questions about the future of crowdsourcing as a means of collecting data.

The Cavanaugh, Callan, and Landers paper reviews a research study comparing MTurk workers to undergraduates on individual difference variables and an online training task.  This paper fills a gap in the existing literature by examining the feasibility of MTurk as an avenue for conducting research on training processes and outcomes.

This symposium will be held Thursday, May 15.

References available

Bookstore self-help sections are laden with volumes telling us to lean in, act confident, or fake it until we make it. Although research shows there are benefits to glass-half-full thinking, it also links overconfidence to outcomes ranging from increased traffic accidents to the recent financial crisis.

In his 5-minute talk at TED@NYC, Hogan Vice President of Research and Innovation Dr. Tomas Chamorro urges the audience to take a more self-aware approach to confidence, and to embrace the power of negative thinking.

The discipline of leadership is highly romanticized (Meindl, 1985). In particular, the popular press sensationalizes leaders by assigning them heroic qualities and crediting them with herculean feats of success. Common observation, however, suggests great people are almost always bad people (Acton, 1887) and that power is abused with surprising regularity (Kellerman, 2004). A relatively new wave of leadership research has exposed this phenomenon under a variety of banners, including petty tyranny, destructive leadership, and managerial derailment. Abusive supervision is one such area that focuses on the hostile actions perpetuated by a supervisor against their subordinates.

Although abusive supervision is a relatively low base-rate phenomenon (Tepper, Duffy, Henle, & Lambert, 2006), the annual damages it perpetuates in terms of health, productivity, retaliation, and employee withdrawal has been estimated to exceed $20 billion (Tepper, 2007). Clearly, the reduction of such behavior would greatly benefit followers and firms alike. While an impressive literature has been amassed on the consequences of abusive supervision (see Schyns & Schilling, 2013), relatively less empirical work has addressed why leaders – intentionally or otherwise – engage in subordinate mistreatment. At the time of his major review, Tepper (2007) noted only three studies on the antecedents of abuse, leading to calls for future research into its origins. Recognizing the likelihood abusive supervision is a multilevel and dynamic phenomenon, the goal of the current symposium is to address this question from a variety of vantage points, including leader characteristics, leader self-concepts, and environmental forces. Our ultimate aim is to help guide future research into this burgeoning arena.

The first study revisits the “great man,” or, in this case, “terrible man,” approach to leadership by pitting the normative side of personality (the Big Five) against its darker or maladaptive counterparts. Further, as a new trait model, Simonet, Bolen, and Nei argue derailing tendencies (as assessed by the Hogan Developmental Survey, HDS), owing to their interpersonally dysfunctional nature, should incrementally predict an abusive proxy above and beyond normative trait models. Using sequential logistic regressions and dominance analyses, they find multiple dysfunctional tendencies (e.g., excitable, cautious, leisurely, dutiful) increase the likelihood of classifying a supervisor as being too forceful and insensitive in their leadership style. Limitations are stressed and implications discussed.

Next, adopting a person-situation interactional approach, Schilling and Schyns provide a more likely portrayal of how supervisors’ dark side traits express themselves in harmful ways. Specifically, they found a main effect for Machiavellianism predicting abusive supervision. This finding was moderated by stress indicating Machiavellianism is less predictive of abusive supervision under high stress situations. They also found a main effect for narcissism predicting abusive supervision. This finding was moderated by procedural justice indicating that narcissism is more predictive of abusive supervision under low procedural justice situations.  Collectively, findings suggest self-interested persons are more likely to mistreat subordinates, a tendency which is exacerbated by unfair procedures and potentially, at least for Machiavellian individuals, mitigated by stress.

The final panelist considers an array of macro-environmental factors which, to date, are woefully underrepresented in contemporary studies of abusive supervision. Using an ecological framework, Mulvey further develops the model of abusive supervision by considering the contextual factors of instability, perceived threat, cultural values, and an absence of checks and balances. Mulvey argues that this perspective allows for a richer and more useful set of research questions and conclusions. As such, this paper highlights the limitations of a purely behavioral perspective providing a contrast to the other papers.

This symposium will be held Thursday, May 15.

References available