Gordon Ramsay, one of the most explosive personalities in the culinary industry, is widely known for his entrepreneurial genius as well as his bullying tactics and creative insults on TV shows Hell’s Kitchen and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. His verbally abusive outbursts have brought tears to many aspiring chefs’ eyes as he decimates their confidence with scathing derision. Back to your Easy-Bake Oven!

Studies show that, while Gordon Ramsay may be sensationalized by reality TV, boss bullies are quite real. According to the Workplace Bullying Institute, 35% of workers have experienced workplace bullying and that, alarmingly, the vast majority are managers, supervisors, and executives.

Many workplace bullies suffered from a turbulent childhood, not excluding Ramsay, and overcompensate later in life with a ruthless drive for power. Unfortunately, studies show that bullied employees have higher rates of turnover and lowered engagement.

Learn how to understand the bullies in your office and never hire another bully again in our complimentary ebook, Bullying Their Way to the Top.

Toxic Leadership Evening hosted by Vital Conversations and Peter Berry Consultancy

Bad bosses are all around, and if you’ve been in the workforce long, odds are you’ve worked for one. But what effect do they have on the workforce? Are they the morale-killing monsters we make them out to be? We asked 577 people. This is what they said.

According to a 2013 survey from insurance provider AIG, negative organizational culture is the number one barrier to patient safety in the healthcare industry. While preventable medical errors is the third leading cause of death in the U.S., it is also one of the highest expenses for healthcare providers –“half of every dollar spent on healthcare costs is related to a medical error,” said Emily Rinehart, a registered nurse and vice president and division manager for healthcare risk consulting at AIG.

There are three main ways company culture can impact patient safety:

• Staff buy-in – How committed is your workforce?
• Communication breakdown – Is your medical staff communicating patient care effectively?
• Compliance vs. commitment – Are you more interested taking disciplinary action or correcting the problem?

Learn how to improve patient safety through your people, culture, and overall message in our newest safety ebook, First, Do No Harm.

Our comprehensive approach to personality assessment provides the depth and detail
you need to understand your people.

What drives individuals to betray their coworkers,
and what companies can do to identify them?

No one has time to read every new piece of research that could impact our field. As a result, it is hard to know what important new findings might pass us by. Luckily, the Hogan Research Division is here to help (and we welcome your contributions in return). Below are a handful of articles we found interesting.

• Helping others might make us feel better about ourselves, but is this a universal phenomenon? Akin et al. found that spending money to help others makes people happy regardless of whether they live in rich or poor countries. They argue that the positive feelings we get from helping others might be ingrained in human nature regardless of country or culture.
• Jansen et al. examined the validity of structure interviews and assessment centers with a unique twist. They found that individuals who were better at identifying what was being measured (e.g., Communication, Problem Solving, etc.) not only did better but their scores were more predictive of job performance. They call this ability the assessment of situational demands. Why, then, is it called faking in the personality literature?
• The debate over bandwidth in personality continues with recent work from Salgado et al. In a large sample of police officers, they found that individual facets of Conscientiousness did not show incremental validity over the scale-level measure, thereby supporting the notion that broad scales work just as well as facets. Why, then, have so many researchers over the years found that facets are often more predictive? Perhaps it has something to do with all of the different samples and/or measures that have been used over the years to example this issue.
• McAbee & Oswald reported meta-analytic results examining relationships between personality and GPA. But perhaps more importantly, the compared results aggregated across different personality instruments to those when treating each personality instrument separately. With Conscientiousness, results were fairly consistent across measures, but results varied for other FFM personality measures. So, when reviewing research examining relationships between personality and other outcomes of interest, keep in mind that all personality assessments cannot be treated equally.

Be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2 of our review in case you missed them.

And again, we invite you to provide information relating to any other articles from the first three months of 2013 that we failed to include here.

In the world of I/O Psychology, we are often presented with statistical results on a daily basis. Although useful, this can be a problem if we don’t understand how to interpret results presented to us or know what questions we should ask to make sure those results are accurate.

This pocket guide is a quick reference for individuals who are confronted with statistical or research terminology regularly used in I/O Psychology. It provides an overview of common statistical terms, techniques, and processes for your reference. With this information, you can be a better consumer of research results and, therefore, make better data-based decisions.

To purchase Statistics: A Pocket Guide for I/O Psychologists, visit the bookstore. 

First, do no harm – a phrase typically associated with the Hippocratic oath medical students take before transitioning into a licensed professional. While nurses and doctors pledge to uphold the highest standard of medical care possible, in corporate healthcare, some aspects of patient safety fall through the cracks.

Nursing and clinical staff face demanding work environments that, when mishandled, can devastate patient care. Long hours, heavy patient loads, and high turnover all contribute to putting patient safety at risk. When it comes to performing in such a high-stakes atmosphere, all applicants are not created equal. Our research shows that there are six personality-based competencies that accurately predict an individual’s ability to perform his or her job safely.

Download our newest safety ebook, First, Do No Harm, to learn what they are and find out how to minimize the risks of patient safety, starting first with your people.