The future of leadership is daunting, and we’re on a mission to do something about it.
Despite continual investment in leadership development from organizations, leaders are struggling. One of the top challenges they face is succession planning.
This October, former Hogan CEO Scott Gregory, PhD, will embark on a tour to address the not-so-good state of leadership. When he stops by a city near you, we’d like to host you for breakfast and a discussion about the state of leadership development from 8:30–10:30 a.m. (We’ll even cover your parking!)
Together, we’ll consider how we got here and how we can get ahead. You’ll hear about how leaders fail, how traditional approaches to leadership development have failed leaders, and how you can avert leader failure within your organization.
Leadership Development Event Schedule
Here’s where we’ll meet:
Atlanta | October 4 The Commerce Club in Peachtree Tower 191 Peachtree St. NE, 49th floor
Chicago | October 12 The Metropolitan Club in Willis Tower 233 S. Wacker Dr., 67th floor
Dallas | October 19 Tower Club in Santander Tower 1601 Elm St., 48th floor
Philadelphia | October 25 Pyramid Club in Mellon Bank Center 1735 Market St., 52nd floor
Washington, DC | October 27 City Club in Columbia Square 555 13th St. NW
We can’t solve this leadership development crisis on our own. Will you join us?
Register today for this free breakfast and conversation. See you soon!
It can be hard to be a new employee. It doesn’t have to be hard for an organization to welcome one, though. Here’s how to welcome a new team member: Be prepared. Be proactive. Be genuine. Be generous. Be considerate. Be communicative.
The care and attention that an organization puts into talent acquisition should extend seamlessly into the employee onboarding journey. How an organization welcomes a new team member exposes the company culture and values more than a mere list of core values does. A strong onboarding process can improve employee retention by more than 80%.1 The onboarding journey creates a lasting impression that influences the entire employee experience (and whether the new team member stays for four weeks or four years).
But before we begin, this one’s really important. Seriously. Welcoming a new team member starts with getting their name right.
A poor first impression due to name confusion is so, so damaging to the welcoming process. We’re talking about confident mastery of pronunciation and spelling of the team member’s name, preferred nickname, and pronouns. Practice until you are certain, then help other team members do the same.
It’s mandatory for the whole team to be able to say, “This is Gloria. She goes by her initials, GG. She’s our newest benefits specialist.” (Mandatory!)
Now that we have names cleared up, we’ll walk you through the importance of values, how to welcome a new team member with advance preparation, what to do in the key first week, and setting the tone for the next week, month, and quarter.
By the way, all the ideas in this guide can apply to in-person team members, remote team members, or hybrid-schedule team members. Take the time to coordinate and organize the onboarding journey thoroughly, and you’ll be welcoming your new team member in no time.
Preparing to Welcome a New Team Member: Values Alignment
Your company values have already been under scrutiny during the interview and hiring process, but that doesn’t end just because a candidate has become an employee. Fostering a sense of belonging, even before a new team member’s first day, is critical. This can be accomplished by understanding and appealing to the new team member’s personality and values.
All of us hold goals, drivers, and interests that determine what kind of work we find fulfilling, how we fit into an organization, and what gets us out of bed in the morning. At Hogan, we measure these drivers using the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI), which consists of 10 scales that reflect how we express our inside characteristics.
Our values influence our occupational preferences and preferred work environment. Security, for example, is a scale that measures the extent to which someone values certainty, predictability, and risk-free environments and holds an interest in structure and order.
Someone with a high Security score would likely be most satisfied working in organizations that emphasize planning, careful decision-making, and risk analysis. Welcoming this new team member would involve a detailed schedule with thoroughly explained reasoning behind the onboarding plan.
Someone with a low Security score would likely be comfortable with or even energized by ambiguity and would likely be most satisfied in a work environment where risk taking, innovation, and initiative are rewarded. Welcoming this new team member with a rigid schedule could seem stifling to their sense of independence.
While it is a good strategy to customize the onboarding journey for everyone, these six practical guidelines will help you to welcome any new team member.
Before the First Day
Get ready in advance to welcome your new team member. Prepared is professional.
Be Prepared
Beyond the necessary new-hire paperwork, prepare information about their work accounts, access, and logins so that they won’t have to spend their first eight hours troubleshooting how to check their email.
Prepare their equipment and workspace by removing their predecessor’s files and fingerprints. Ensure that remote equipment is delivered on time (meaning before the first day). Additional necessities like employee IDs, business cards, parking stickers, or building access badges should be prepared in advance if possible.
All this preparation will likely require coordination among HR, IT, and leadership, so give yourself plenty of time. Demonstrating that you have planned for this specific new team member will send a strong welcome message from the start.
Be Proactive
Your new team member will have questions about the role, the team, and the organization. Answer some of these questions in advance and the rest during the team member’s first week. You might also consider taking any of the following actions:
Send an email about what to expect for the first couple of days.
Introduce the team member to the individuals who will be integral to onboarding.
Select a buddy or coach to for the new team member to shadow.
Have something ready for the new person to work on, not just all paperwork and training. Use finesse to select a project that isn’t simply busy work but also isn’t time sensitive in case revision is needed.
The gist of being proactive is to give the new team member a picture of what their role will be like. Help them take the first steps in building relationships and doing productive, meaningful work.
The First Week
By the time a new team member’s first day rolls around, you probably are quite excited to have added them as a colleague. Let it show!
Be Genuine
Welcoming a new team member during the first week is all about interpersonal connections. We spend about 90,000 hours at work in our lifetime, so finding people who we like working with makes the time more enjoyable. Being genuine and authentic speeds that process along.
On the morning of the very first day, make sure to welcome the new team member personally, whether in the office or virtually. Scheduling time for team members to get to know each other will help facilitate connections. If it’s a team virtual coffee, provide food delivery. If it’s a small group or 1:1, have a couple of easy icebreaker questions ready—and be certain to answer them yourself too.
Also on the first day, send an email to the team, department, or company introducing the new team member. Do take the time to personalize the welcome email (and remember our advice about names). This is a brief example: “We are so proud to welcome Rima to the direct sales team. In addition to her previous experience in B2B tech sales where she broke company records, Rima is also an avid rock climber. Join us in welcoming her to the sales floor!” Copy Rima on that email as well.
Make plenty of space during the first week for face-to-face meetings with the new team member, the team, and the team leader. That’s the heart of this objective: integrating a new team member into the team.
Prioritizing genuine relationships is an essential step in welcoming a new team member.
Be Generous
Being generous is the second stage of being proactive. It means making sure the new team member has access to all the digital or physical tools and equipment they need to do their work. Suppose your new team member needs a left-handed vertical ergonomic mouse, a lefty keyboard for single-handed typing, and a quality set of headphones for talk-to-text. Don’t stint on essentials.
Honestly, don’t stint on perks either. This seems pretty basic, but don’t call it a team lunch if the company isn’t catering. If everyone in the office received water bottles with logos a couple of years ago, send one to your new remote team member too.
Show them they’re welcome by being open-handed with resources. It’s the above-and-beyond touches that make a new team member feel valued and valuable.
Be Considerate
Being considerate means putting yourself in the new team member’s position.
Here’s where knowledge of their personality is especially helpful. While many people don’t feel comfortable speaking extemporaneously to a crowd of strangers, putting someone on the spot with a “tell us about yourself” could be particularly excruciating to someone with a high score in Prudence, who is not intrinsically flexible, or someone with a low score in Sociability, who prefers listening before talking.
Try not to make assumptions. Instead, ask the new team member about their preferences (while setting expectations). You might say, “Srikar, in our weekly department meeting, our team will announce that you’ve joined us. Would you like to introduce yourself, or would you like me to?” This lets Srikar own being the center of attention to the extent he is comfortable.
Not putting someone on the spot is just an example of treating a new team member considerately. It’s also expressed in providing them with an employee directory, introducing them by email to key stakeholders, ensuring a clear training plan, explaining inside jokes, and tailoring communications and tasks to accord with their values and personality if possible. Do what you can to assuage their anxieties and anticipate their questions.
Let them know you’re there for them, and then be there for them.
The Next Week and Beyond
Onboarding isn’t over after the first five business days.
Be Communicative
Make it an ongoing practice to talk about values, expectations, and resources to maintain the atmosphere of welcome that you built at the start.
Values – Help the new team member understand where their values fit in relation to those of the team overall—ideally during a team development session. A team that compositely scores high in Aesthetics on the MVPI will likely value artistic self-expression and innovation but may consequently struggle with tasks perceived as old or repetitive. A team with low scores in Science will likely prefer working with people to working with technology and may struggle with research or data.
Development – Start working on a development and growth plan with the new team member right away. When new employees can envision where they will be in their career trajectory next quarter, next year, and three years from now, it is easier for them to make plans to stay. The data are clear: “Employees who strongly agree they have a clear plan for their professional development are 3.5 times more likely to strongly agree that their onboarding process was exceptional.”2
Resources – Periodically check in to make sure that the new team member has everything needed to fulfill their job responsibilities. Equip them with not only resources but also people by helping them learn where to take various questions that arise in the course of their work.
Welcoming a new team member means treating others as they want to be treated. This means being prepared, proactive, genuine, generous, considerate, and communicative. It especially means understanding how the values of the new team member add to the team—and tailoring your welcome to their personality.
Gallup’s Perspective on Creating an Exceptional Onboarding Journey for New Employees. (2019). Gallup. http://acrip.co/contenidos-acrip/gallup/2020/octubre/gallup-perspective-creating-an-exceptional-onboarding-journey-for-new-employees.pdf
There’s never a dull moment as we consider the future of work. A major driver behind the Great Resignation is an increase in job openings, as strange as that may seem. And the phenomenon recently called quiet quitting has been around a lot longer than TikTok itself.
Recently on The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, chief science officer, and Blake Loepp, PR manager, chatted about two hot topics affecting organizations and the global workforce: the Great Resignation and quiet quitting.
Let’s dive into these two issues from a personality standpoint.
The Great Resignation
What caused the Great Resignation? Among the many potential reasons for workers resigning their jobs, economists suggest that a primary driver is job openings. “Most people who are quitting a job are quitting to go take another job,” Ryne pointed out.
We see different job opening rates across different industries. Retail, healthcare, and food services are industries where we have seen the most quitting. In these and other industries, such as hospitality, education, or emergency services, working from home is not always possible. The stress of an environment where workers are expected to pick up the hours or responsibilities of their coworkers who have resigned can lead straight to burnout.
This might be a better question: what caused the job openings?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, people who might have been considering resignation held onto their jobs due to the uncertainty of the employment market. Once people began to return to work, they likely acted on their pent-up willingness to leave. The pandemic also caused a lot of people to reevaluate their priorities. Some left the workforce altogether, some embraced the flexibility of remote work, and some chose entrepreneurship, self-employment, or gig work.
Personality and Values
From a personality standpoint, workers who might be shifting their priorities and making big career changes show four trends on the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) and Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI):
Ambition – People who score high on Ambition (HPI) tend to seek leadership roles and may be willing to switch positions to achieve that goal. They aren’t likely to exercise patience when an opportunity for advancement becomes available.
Power – People who score high on Power (MVPI) are motivated to get to the top and push for results. They may not be willing to wait their turn, especially if they feel they are stagnating in a role.
Adjustment – People who score low on Adjustment (HPI) tend to be easily frustrated or disappointed. They may be motivated to look for a new job in general because they think a change could improve their circumstances.
Hedonism – People who score high on Hedonism (MVPI) are motivated by a flexible lifestyle that allows them to get the most value out of their personal time. They may be more likely to reevaluate their circumstances to switch jobs in favor of hybrid or remote work environments.
From an organizational perspective, there are three themes to keep in mind that employees are likely to be seeking when they start their search for a new job:
Money – People who have switched jobs during the Great Resignation have earned significant increases in salary. Organizations that keep their salaries competitive will do better at retention than those that don’t.
Flexibility -A huge array of individual differences determines where and when workers want to work. Organizations that offer flexibility to give employees the most choice and control will seem highly attractive.
Value – Employees want to know that organizations are paying attention to them and care about them. Supportive policies, development opportunities, and selecting leaders who build relationships are some of the ways organizations can show they value their workers.
Quiet Quitting
Quiet quitting is a phenomenon that recently went viral on TikTok—but it’s not really all that new. “Quiet quitting is just a modern form of disengagement,” Ryne said. “Quiet quitting means not performing your best.”
Although disengagement isn’t new, it is important. Engagement data from Gallup shows that, since 2000, about 30% of US workers are engaged, while about 20% of the global workforce is.1 That means a pretty large percentage of workers are less than fully engaged or actively disengaged at work.
People who feel underpaid or unappreciated may choose to work with less attention or efficiency than they are able. Occasionally, they may deliberately waste time or only pretend to work. At worst, they could try to sabotage productivity or profitability.
We find the phenomenon of quiet quitting in every generation. These are early-career workers who don’t find their work meaningful, employees struggling to balance work with childcare or eldercare, or late-career workers who have decided to coast until retirement.
Personality and Values
Are there personality characteristics especially associated with quiet quitting? Highly motivated or highly competitive individuals aren’t very likely to be quiet quitters because of their desires to get ahead.
Every person, however, has unique motives, values, and preferences for work they feel to be rewarding. If their values are being met in the workplace, employees will probably find their work to be fulfilling, engaging, or meaningful.
To mitigate quiet quitting and better motivate employees, organizations should understand the importance of personal motivation and leadership development.
“What’s causing the Great Resignation at a deep level is a leadership problem. It’s about managers and how they are motivating their employees,” Ryne said. He pointed out that often the managers themselves are disengaged, which can contribute to absentee leadership.
Solving the disengagement problem starts with getting the right leaders in place. Leaders who engage and motivate employees by showing they are valued and that their contributions matter can help reverse quiet quitting and the Great Resignation.
“It all points back up, as it does so often, to leadership,” Ryne said.
Listen to this conversation in full on episode 59 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts. Cheers, everybody!
Ryne Sherman, PhD, chief science officer for Hogan, gave a presentation on leadership through organizational crisis in summer 2022.
In 2018, Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 experienced engine failure. Debris from the engine struck the wing and a window, causing rapid decompression in the cabin and one passenger fatality. The flight’s captain, Tammie Jo Shults, who was one of the first women to become a fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy, calmly worked with air traffic control to land the plane successfully. Organizations always have crises, but they don’t always have leaders as skilled, self-possessed, and decisive as Captain Shults. What does it take to lead effectively through an organizational crisis?
First, we’ll explore what leadership means. Next, we’ll review characteristics of leaders who succeed through crises. Finally, we’ll touch on what organizations can do to develop crisis-resilient leaders.
What Do We Mean by Leadership?
Crisis is commonplace. Every organization will face a crisis at some point. Leaders are responsible for dealing with those crises, and their legacy is typically defined by how well they handle challenges.
Leadership is related to organizational success. In fact, research shows that leadership has a significant impact on organizational financial results. Who’s in charge really matters.
When we think about leadership, we need to start with human origins. Humans are a group-living species, meaning that leadership has always been critical for group survival. It involves convincing people to put aside their self-motivated goals to work together to accomplish a bigger task that benefits the group. Whether we’re talking about warfare, business, or athletics, successful leadership hinges on group effectiveness.
Leadership is the ability to build and maintain a high-performing team.
At Hogan, we’ve been studying leadership in conjunction with team outcomes and organizational effectiveness for decades. We’ve learned a thing or two about how personality predicts who leads and how they lead.
What Are Crisis-Resilient Leadership Characteristics?
A quick word on these data: Hogan’s data science team surveyed studies on effective leadership through crises, identified the behaviors of successful leaders, and mapped them to the Hogan competency model. (We have conducted more than 400 criterion-related validity studies. That means we looked at personality and performance to learn which competencies matter for which behaviors, including effective leadership.)
So, what are the personality characteristics of leaders who effectively lead through a crisis?
Without further ado, let’s get to our findings . . .
Bright-Side Personality Characteristics in Leadership
The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) assesses the bright side of personality using seven scales to predict how people behave when they are at their best. Two HPI scales are related to how leaders respond during crisis situations: Adjustment and Ambition.
Adjustment measures the degree to which a person appears confident, self-accepting, and stable under pressure. Adjustment has to do with whether a leader panics easily or remains calm. It also speaks to whether the leader can confidently make critical decisions. (Think of Tammie Jo Shults’s composure as the airplane’s engine failed.)
Ambition measures the degree to which a person appears self-confident, leader-like, competitive, and energetic. The Ambition scale can indicate a leader who models appropriate behavior to maintain order and who can adapt to unanticipated changes. The early days of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed how a leader’s response trickles down throughout an organization. When the leader appears calm, everybody else can feel calm.
Dark-Side Personality Characteristics in Leadership
The Hogan Development Survey (HDS) assesses the dark side of personality using 11 scales that concern how people behave when they stop self-managing. The HDS scales fall into three categories that show stress responses defined by moving away, moving against, or moving toward others:
Moving Away – managing a sense of inadequacy by social withdrawal.
Moving Against – managing self-doubts by persuading or manipulating others.
Moving Toward – managing insecurities by building alliances or seeking approval.
Crises increase stress in everyone, including leaders. The Moving Away category, which comprises five scales, represents the most ineffective responses for a leader during crisis. When people move away in a crisis, they might downplay the size of the problem, ignore the problem, or even deny that it exists.
The type of leader people need during a crisis is realistic, calm, confident, and communicative. The Moving Away derailers are contrary to these qualities. Under pressure, a Cautious leader might become risk averse, reluctant to take initiative, and fearful of mistakes and failure. A Reserved leader may be disinclined to engage and communicate with others and may become overly tough or critical. Excitable means a leader might struggle to remain resilient or productive when faced with setbacks.
Values in Leadership
The Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) uses 10 scales to measure the inside of personality, which consists of values that are often unconscious but determine career satisfaction. Of all the scales, two are associated with handling crises: Affiliation and Security.
Affiliation concerns valuing frequent and varied social interaction. Leaders who score high on Affiliation tend to value networking and feeling a sense of belonging to a group or organization. Affiliation, which is positively associated with leading during crises, is related to showing the people involved in the crisis that you care and are part of their group too. Making people feel valued and supported is the important leadership behavior here.
Security concerns valuing certainty, predictability, and risk-free environments. Leaders valuing Security are often interested in structure, order, predictability, and planning for the future. They might struggle with ambiguity, whereas people who are low in Security are accepting about not knowing all the information or what will happen next. Security, therefore, is negatively associated with crisis leadership. Leaders low in Security are comfortable making decisions in the face of risk and thus tend to handle crises well.
What Can Organizations Do?
Putting it all together, a leader who has what it takes to lead through a crisis can remain calm, accurately evaluate the problem, make decisions quickly and effectively without perfect information, and reassure other people. Organizations can prepare for potential crises by focusing on leadership selection and leadership development.
To find leaders who will effectively lead through a crisis, use a personality assessment to inform hiring decisions. Personality is highly stable, so selecting leaders with low Security or high Ambition, for example, is a wise strategy. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, after all.
If an organization has leaders already in place, leadership development opportunities can help them improve their ability to respond to crises. Development is the behavioral change that results from proactively managing reputation. A quality assessment that measures reputation can help leaders understand how others are likely to see their strengths, potential weaknesses, motivation, and values. With this strategic self-awareness, leaders can learn to adapt their behaviors under stress to perform more effectively.
Crisis is inevitable. Leadership is critical. Organizations with effective leaders in place will handle crises better than those without. With the right leaders in place, crisis becomes an opportunity for organizations to come out ahead.
This post is based on “What It Takes to Lead Through Organizational Crisis,” a presentation given by Ryne Sherman, PhD, chief science officer, in conjunction with Peter Berry Consultancy in July 2022. Watch the entire presentation here.
By now, you likely have heard the term quiet quitting. Since the idea went viral on TikTok, quiet quitting has been debated, clarified, celebrated, and reviled. It seems to evoke strong, emotional reactions from individual contributors to corporate leaders and everyone in between.
Because the original TikTok video about quiet quitting was posted by a Gen Zer, some have suggested that it is a new and generationally specific phenomenon, serving as a point of validation for a scientifically unsupported belief that Gen Zers are slackers at heart. Although quiet quitting is a new term, it isn’t a new phenomenon. It is another manifestation of the cultural shift happening in the world of work since the beginning of the pandemic. As many employees are reconsidering their purpose in work and in life, some are quiet quitting as a result of that reexamination.
Nonetheless, some people always have shown limited engagement at work. That isn’t a generational phenomenon either. Depending on the underlying reason for quiet quitting, it may be beneficial or detrimental to a person’s performance.
Let’s look at each claim in turn.
Is Quiet Quitting New?
In 1906, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto observed a phenomenon in wealth distribution that would later become adapted to management and coined the Pareto principle by Joseph Juran in the 1950s. Simply put, the Pareto principle states that 80% of the outcomes will result from 20% of the causes. In workplace terms, 80% of work productivity will be created by 20% of the employees. At least since the Industrial Revolution, some workers have exerted a lot of effort, some have exerted a moderate amount, and many have exerted minimal or little effort. In other words, it seems likely that quiet quitting has been around for a while.
Similarly, in our study of personality, individual differences determine the degree to which people appear confident, competitive, challenge seeking, leader-like, and focused on achieving results—the opposite of quiet quitting. This is what we measure on the Hogan Personality Inventory’s Ambition scale. High scorers on Ambition are like the 20%; they drive most of the results in an organization. When we plot individual differences on the Ambition scale for thousands of people, the result is close to a bell curve. People who score in the high range are unlikely to be quiet quitters. This pattern of individual differences is not new and seems to be universal.
Is Quiet Quitting Mostly Limited to Gen Z?
Conducted across several countries with hundreds of thousands of working adults, Hogan’s research shows that there are some small differences among some personality characteristics and values by generation. Although those differences are statistically significant, they have little practical significance. That means it does not appear that one generation or another can, on average, be described as more or less Ambitious, hardworking, or prone to quiet quitting. Whether a person is a quiet quitter or routinely goes above and beyond expectations at work appears unrelated to their generational cohort.
Is Quiet Quitting Helpful or Harmful to the Quiet Quitter?
It depends. For example, the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) measures a characteristic we call Diligent. High scorers on Diligent are described as detail oriented, hardworking, and having high standards. But they may also try to make everything a high priority, seem perfectionistic, and find it difficult to delegate. As a result, they might be more prone to overworking and burnout than low scorers. A high Diligent scorer who decides to focus on meeting expectations, rather than always aiming for perfection, may benefit in improved mental and physical wellbeing. For this person, a decision to work less (or in a more focused way) may reflect strong self-awareness and lead to greater overall efficacy.
However, in some circumstances, quiet quitting also can be a form of passive aggression—particularly if an individual takes no action to correct a poor work situation other than to quietly work less, putting in minimal effort with the objective of remaining employed. For example, the HDS measures another characteristic we call Leisurely. A key descriptor of high scorers on the Leisurely scale is that they avoid overt conflict while quietly or passively ignoring commitments or agreements. Because of this, high Leisurely scorers may be more prone to quiet quitting.
This type of quiet quitting can be self-defeating in a couple of ways. First, if the individual fails to meet the organization’s expectations for the role, the strategy of working less but staying employed may backfire. At best, it would be difficult for a person to sustain a “just right” amount of work for very long, especially during an economic downturn in which performance is scrutinized closely.
Second, the person’s indirect approach to solving feelings about their work may be perceived as avoiding difficult conversations, playing the victim, or even as untrustworthy or unethical. Such perceptions can permanently damage relationships and lead to a reputation that is difficult to change.
What Is the Alternative to Quiet Quitting?
People have fundamental needs for connection with others, for status among peers, and to make sense out of the world or to find meaning. For talent management professionals and leaders, it can be productive to ask why people in your organization may be feeling unfulfilled or undervalued by your organization. By exploring the underlying reasons for those feelings you’ll likely find they are related to one or more of those three fundamental needs.
After you’ve identified the underlying need that isn’t being met, the critical question is why. Organizational reasons, individual reasons, or both may be at the root. For example, 65% of U.S. workers indicate they would rather fire their boss than receive a pay raise.1 Bad bosses destroy engagement and create toxic relationships, and low engagement is related to quiet quitting.
It also could be that the individual is in a role that doesn’t fit their needs or skills, and the organization could help find a better role inside the organization. Fostering an open discussion about the role may be a good start.
In some cases, however, the individual simply may have made a self-defeating choice. In these cases, development activities or coaching may help raise self-awareness that could lead to a more productive choice for the individual and organization.
This blog post was authored by Scott Gregory, PhD, a world-renowned IO psychologist.
Are luxury possessions and speeding tickets indicative of CEOs who will cultivate scandal and commit fraud? They can be. Recently on The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, chief science officer, and Blake Loepp, PR manager, spoke with Aiyesha Dey, PhD, associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, about how CEO personality influences CEO behavior.
By researching the personal lives of CEOs and their behavior outside of the workplace, Aiyesha has identified data that can be quite predictive of how they may perform on the job.
Let’s dive into how the personality characteristics of materialism and rule breaking can affect CEO behavior.
CEO Personality Matters
Even with systemic fixes and the right incentives, not everyone will behave the same. That’s why corporate scandals still occur despite layers of regulation. Individual managerial styles matter.
“We know managers matter, but what about them is important?” Aiyesha asked. “What should we care about, and how does it matter for corporate outcomes?” Those questions inspired her research into about 1,000 public companies and executives in the US. Her findings? Certain personality characteristics, observable in off-the-job lifestyles of executives, correlate with actions executives take within organizations.1
Regulators can step in and uncover fraud and scandals after they’ve already taken place—after shareholders have lost resources and employees have lost jobs. The goal of looking at lifestyles of executives is to know some indicators of risk beforehand. Stopping these actions before they take place by using an empirical measure of character is the underlying motivation driving the research.
Understanding CEO Risk Factors
Aiyesha’s research has shown two characteristics that could lead to major corporate blunders: materialism and an inclination toward rule breaking. However, organizations often ignore evidence of these values when hiring CEOs, especially for internal hires. Why?
First, there’s no need to dismiss a CEO candidate because they have multiple luxury assets or a few speeding tickets. They likely bring many other desirable strengths to the table, such as innovation, creativity, and a certain comfort with risk.
“But leaders can be a strong force in establishing the culture of the firm,” Aiyesha pointed out. Someone who breaks rules might inspire a culture that rewards rule breaking, for instance.
Most firms focus on education, experience, and accomplishments in selection. Including behavioral attributes in selection criteria can add to the educational and professional qualifications already in consideration. “Boards can definitely take more cautionary measures in their hiring practices, like expanding background checks for internal candidates,” Aiyesha added.
Repeated legal infractions or a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption are not reasons to dismiss a candidate. Candidates with these behavioral attributes bring very strong upsides to the table, but the attributes can be warning signs about questionable behavior or values. Knowing what strengths and potential shortcomings a person brings to the role is the first step in establishing a system or process to mitigate the individual’s risks.
CEO Behavior: Materialism
Measuring materialism in a CEO can be a challenge. For one, the signs must be observable. For another, the signs must be indicative of values, which is more difficult to discern.
When psychology researchers talk about materialism, they mean a set of values that define how individuals weigh intrinsic motivations, such as spirituality, benevolence, or community, relative to extrinsic motivations, such as image, status, or material possessions. “A very materialistic person will seek material acquisitions at the cost of community values,” Aiyesha said.
Merely possessing a lot of luxury goods is not sufficient to make one materialistic. “When someone has a zeal to pursue material possessions at the cost of the welfare of others and potentially themselves, they are exemplifying a materialistic value system,” Aiyesha said. The observable assets of executives like houses, cars, and yachts compared to their wealth level shows how intent they are on acquiring material possessions. If someone possesses five times the value of luxury assets as another person at the same wealth level, then it’s safe to say they probably have a tendency towards materialism.
Materialism is potentially a problem in a corporate setting if a CEO is willing to waste shareholder resources or damage the welfare of others to get material goods. This value held by a leader affects the values of the organization, as well.
CEO Behavior: Rule Breaking
Like materialism, external rule-breaking behavior speaks to internal values. The underlying construct is a lack of self-control and disregard for rules and laws. If you believe rules don’t apply to you, you’ll be more likely to violate them to achieve your goals.
In looking at executives’ legal records, Aiyesha found that executives with legal infractions had a higher propensity to commit fraud and manipulate earnings numbers than those without. The results were true even for executives with only traffic or speeding violations. “Even minor violations can give an indication of deeper personality differences,” Aiyesha observed.
Here’s a twist: executives with prior legal infractions tend to be involved in committing the fraud themselves, while materialistic executives tend to create a culture where other people are implicated in the fraud.
Given that corporate fraud is an extremely rare event, Aiyesha also looked at the tendency to profit from insider trading. Rule-breaking CEOs profited more; the outsized profitability and lucrative timing suggest that they could have benefited unfairly. There also seems to be a correlation between these profits and the severity of the legal infraction—the more severe, the more profitable.
So, what should organizations do?
How to Hire a CEO
Based on Aiyesha’s research findings, these are the steps that organizations hiring for C-suite positions can take.
In general, boards should not dismiss a candidate simply due to luxury possessions or speeding tickets. They should, however, be aware of the risks that could point to a red flag.
Expanding selection criteria to include background checks and looking at behavioral attributes in addition to professional successes could be useful. Where necessary, organizations can also implement risk management and compliance measures as guardrails. Lastly, organizations can also help executives to develop strategic self-awareness and encourage them to define personal guardrails to manage their behavior.
A Vote for CEO Frugality
“I want to end on a positive note and celebrate another characteristic that is linked to materialism. The opposite of materialism is frugality,” Aiyesha said. “Our research shows very strong consistent results of how frugal executives benefit companies in terms of stewardship of shareholder resources.”
The values of leaders set the culture of organizations. Materialistic or rule-breaking CEOs can tacitly foster an environment of materialism and rule breaking. Frugal CEOs, on the other hand, tend to have tighter controls and risk management systems. They tend to take a long-term focus and shape ethical cultures. These CEOs tend to focus on socially responsible activities.
“Creating a culture of frugality in organizations, either through hiring that mindset or by celebrating such an attitude so that it inspires everyone to have this notion, can take companies a long way in creating shareholder values,” Aiyesha said.
Listen to this conversation in full on episode 58 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts. Cheers, everybody!
Reference
Dey, A. (2022, July). When Hiring CEOs, Focus on Character. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2022/07/when-hiring-ceos-focus-on-character
In terms of personality, elite athletes are a competitive, hardworking, organized, goal-driven, motivated group of individuals. Would you expect them to be people pleasers too?
On The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, chief science officer, and Blake Loepp, PR manager, recently discussed what personality characteristics translate to success for elite athletes.
Hogan Assessments has collected personality data from a unique sample set: the draft classes of 2021 and 2022 for the National Football League (NFL)—approximately 600 athletes performing at the 99.9th percentile.
Let’s dive into what data tell us about the personality of elite athletes.
A Deep Dive into the Data
Given that the NFL draft prospects are proven team players, you might expect to see that they have specific personality characteristics in common. But the data could surprise you.
Hogan Personality Inventory
The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) measures the bright side of personality, how we present ourselves at our best. The elite athletes scored 74% on Adjustment, on average, which means they likely show resilience to stress and failure. Professional athletes have their every move scrutinized and criticized by hundreds of thousands of people, and they overcome failure repeatedly to achieve their incredibly high level of performance. “Being able to handle that pressure and rise to the occasion is really important,” Ryne pointed out.
A drawback to high Adjustment can be overconfidence. In the United States, football players are often celebrated and even glorified in high school, college, and their professional careers. This can make it easy for them to believe they don’t need any feedback. (Listen to our conversation with Gillian Hyde in episode 17 to hear more about downsides of high Adjustment.)
Hogan Development Survey
The Hogan Development Survey (HDS) measures the dark side of personality, or derailing behaviors that may manifest under stress and pressure. There were a few remarkably elevated scores, specifically on the Reserved, Bold, Diligent, and Dutiful scales.
Reserved (84%) – High Reserved scores show that these elite athletes likely see themselves as individualistic, tough minded, and distant. They’re less focused on group participation and more focused on individual accomplishment.
Bold (84%) – A high score on the Bold scale indicates confidence. This is not unfounded, considering that these athletes are performing at the very top of their profession. Another factor affecting the Bold score is age. Ryne pointed out that Bold tends to be higher when younger and lower when older. The athletes who completed the personality tests were in their very early twenties.
Diligent (84%) – A high Diligent score indicates meticulousness and perfectionism, a necessary characteristic for players who have drilled in precision skills from an early age.
Dutiful (91%) – Dutiful, the most prominent derailer of the group, refers to having the loyalty and discipline to follow orders but can also suggest being deferential or ingratiating.
Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory
The Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) measures the inside drivers that underlie behaviors. Surprisingly, Affiliation was not a high score but a low one at 26%. Affiliation concerns values associated with social interaction and working with others.
Ryne suggested this low score might stem from the need for self-focus in preparing to play in the NFL. “I don’t have time for friendships and relationships that are outside of football,” he surmised. “I’ve got to stay focused on my ultimate goal.”
Another aspect of the Affiliation score is the toughness that the football players adopt to appeal to the NFL. This could cause them to value relationships lower than individualism and competitiveness. “For the most part, I think we’re capturing something representative of how these people want to be seen, even outside of this athletic context,” Ryne added.
What the Data Mean for Coaches
Coaches who want to handle and mitigate the elevated HDS derailers should take note of Dutiful. “That high Dutiful score suggests to me that a lot of these players are looking for structure,” Ryne said. High school and college provided routine and fixed external expectations. Considering that, coaches of new professional athletes should protect their players from the risks posed by a sudden loss of structure.
Coaches should also remember that individual achievement motivates elite athletes. “Here is a group of players who, despite all their success, despite being 99.99th percentile, are still hungry,” Ryne said. Although they’re disciplined about following rules and excel at taking instruction, they are highly competitive people. They measure their worth with achievements in their field. In other words, coaches must spur their players to succeed.
Advice for the Player-to-Coach Transition
Players who want to become coaches need to focus on relationship skills. Competence or even excellence at the sport is not enough to make it as a coach. Successful coaches understand how to build relationships and teams.
Instead of succeeding through competition, a coach succeeds through cooperation. Therefore, a player transitioning into coaching should focus on the answer to the one essential question: Will they play for me?
“The critical thing I would be developing as someone who wanted to go into coaching is understanding other people to build those relationships,” Ryne said.
Listen to this conversation in full on episode 45 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts. Cheers, everybody!
“Alone we can do so little. Together we can do so much.” This quote, attributed to Helen Keller, is as true today as it was in the 1920s. A cohesive team is one of the most effective ways to accomplish work and achieve goals. Virtual team-building activities for bringing remote teams and hybrid teams together encourage successful collaboration and employee engagement.
Because a hybrid workforce seems to be here to stay, a strategy for building team trust remotely is important. Engaged employees are committed to each other and the organization, reach high levels of productivity, and show enjoyment and enthusiasm about their work. Disengaged employees, on the other hand, are measurably less positive, loyal, creative, and hardworking than engaged workers. Given that employee disengagement has cost $7.8 trillion,1 it’s vital to plan engaging team-building activities and virtual talent development.
Furthermore, virtual team building can be inclusive. Although remote work became widespread with the advent of COVID-19, it has long been used as a reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities. Virtual team-building games and activities offer opportunities to create and sustain a culture of inclusion by facilitating connection and belonging among team members. An effective virtual team is connected, engaged, inclusive, and productive.
Although all people can benefit from team-building exercises, some personalities may be more eager to participate than others. A high score on the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) Sociability scale indicates someone who is socially proactive and team oriented. Scoring high on the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) Affiliation scale indicates someone who values teamwork, relationships, networking, and belonging.
Virtual team building can be adapted for each unique team. Team leaders should provide a variety of team-building exercises to support the diverse people who work together on the team.
Read on to learn about these five virtual team-building activities:
Entertainment for virtual teams is a fun, relaxed way to spend time together, connect over common experiences, and build rapport.
Host a virtual movie event or a watch party using nearly any streaming service or a third-party option like Scener.
Book a virtual comedian for a comedy club experience. Summit Comedy offers many options, including corporate comedians and even hypnotists.
If your team is musical (or even if not), try virtual karaoke with an emcee from Kabloom!
Take a remote tour of India, Spain, France, or other global destinations with an organization like Woyago.
Who would like these virtual team-building activities?
Team members who score high on the MVPI scale Hedonism value a playful, fun, lighthearted work culture. People with high scores on the Sociability subscales Likes Parties and Likes Crowds will also enjoy large-group social gatherings.
Virtual Dining
A part of office life that many remote workers miss is the chance to spend time with coworkers over a meal. These virtual dining options will help employees reconnect.
Building in time to chat around the virtual watercooler with Donut has rekindled conversations in many a virtual workplace.
Meeting with virtual teams for lunch is nearly as easy as setting a recurring meeting, according to this guide to hosting virtual lunch.
For a remote happy hour, schedule a guided wine tasting or a beer and cheese tasting box through a company like Unboxed Experiences.
Who would like these virtual team-building activities?
Team members who score high on HPI Interpersonal Sensitivity are warm, easygoing, and enjoy interacting with others. Those who score high on HPI Inquisitive will appreciate the opportunity to converse about beliefs and cultures. People with a high score on the Affiliation Lifestyles subscale value the opportunity to connect and strengthen relationships.
Virtual Games
Playing games together could take just the first 10 minutes of a meeting or be a separate event. Competitive employees will enjoy the challenge. Noncompetitive employees will enjoy watching the antics of their coworkers.
Play a remote game like trivia or a scavenger hunt using a platform like Weve.
Themed escape rooms, such as those offered by Escapely, are filled with puzzles and clues that encourage team collaboration.
Themed murder mysteries from My Mystery Party and others will allow team members to spend time together playing hilarious roles.
Who would like these virtual team-building games?
Team members who score high on HPI Learning Approach will appreciate complex games and memory tests. Those who score high on Inquisitive will enjoy brainstorming ideas and solving riddles or puzzles. People with high scores on Hedonism enjoy the spontaneity of game play, and those who score high on Sociability enjoy exhibiting in the limelight. Finally, high scorers on HPI Ambition will provide competitive energy and drive.
Virtual Classes
Learning something new together is a team-building activity that fuels deep connections. It could also reveal shared interests that coworkers didn’t know they had.
Take an instructor-led mixology or cooking course with an organization like Rockoly.
Exercise your artistic side with a team painting event through Painting to Gogh.
Recenter your team during a virtual yoga or mindfulness class offered by Krafty Lab.
Level up your remote communication game with virtual improv training through TeamBonding.
Who would like these virtual team-building exercises?
Team members scoring high on HPI Prudence enjoy exercising a skill with precision and keeping on task. Those who score high on Inquisitive are intrinsically curious about new challenges, and those who score high on MVPI Aesthetics value creative expression. As well, people with low Sociability scores may feel less pressure to be social in a class setting.
Virtual Team Development
An essential part of the virtual team-building repertoire of an effective team leader is team development.
Data-driven team development uncovers how individual personalities affect team performance and team dynamics. Development helps team members contextualize themselves within the team and understand how they uniquely contribute to the team’s needs.
Who would like virtual team development?
Everyone benefits, of course. Leaders want to improve team performance. Team members want to work together effectively.
Team development sessions can help people learn about how they contribute to the team with their unique personality strengths. For example, those who measure high on Ambition tend to have high initiative and drive and are willing to assume leadership roles within the team. Those who score average or low on Ambition are more team-oriented and comfortable contributing in a supportive role.
Team members with high Sociability scores seek to know how best to engage with others. Members with high Prudence scores want to understand team interdependencies and processes.
People with moderate or low Power and Recognition scores value sharing credit and collaboration. Those with high Affiliation value opportunities to work with others. Team members with high Science scores value decision-making based on the data that team development provides.
The chief takeaway here is that team development is essential to positive team dynamics. From there, a variety of team-building games and activities engage and delight a variety of team members. Ongoing virtual team building enables ongoing rapport.
Once you’ve tried the activities listed here, you won’t be out of options—you could invite a goat to your next virtual meeting. Goats don’t drive engagement, per se, but they do enliven a weekly standup.
To discover how Hogan helps support team development, contact us.
Reference
Pendell, R. (2022, June 14). The World’s $7.8 Trillion Workplace Problem. Gallup. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/393497/world-trillion-workplace-problem.aspx
When a role becomes vacant, we usually strive to replace the person, not the personality. But is that really the most equitable and efficient way to tackle role replacement, particularly employee replacement?
Recently on The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, chief science officer, and Blake Loepp, PR manager, spoke with Bradley Brummel, PhD, professor and director of industrial-organizational psychology, at the University of Tulsa, about role replacement.
Whether replacing an employee, a teammate, or even a romantic partner, people usually adopt one of two lines of thinking. We want either someone exactly like the previous person or someone completely opposite. Personality is a key component of both approaches.
“I hear people saying, ‘Thank goodness my boss finally left. Whatever we do, we can’t have another one of this person—and normally they’ll use their name,” said Brad. “That’s the average person’s approach to some of these situations.”
Now, let’s dive into the intricacies of role replacement and how organizations should handle employee replacement.
What Is Role Replacement?
When someone moves on to a new job, you might hear people say, “I need another Janelle” or “I’m never hiring another Tim.” People will express the need to replace a role in their life in terms of the person’s name instead of the role itself. “It allows the person to evocatively know what they’re running towards to try to replace or running away from, but it’s also really restricting,” Brad observed.
Saying that you’re looking for a Jennifer or a Wei instead of a faculty member to teach intro to psych classes could be constraining. It’s as if you’re searching for either a prototype or a complete opposite. What you need to search for, however, is a set of personality characteristics.
Role Replacement by Characteristics
Someone replacing a positive romantic relationship might search for someone of the same gender or similar appearance. Someone replacing a negative romantic relationship might search for someone of a completely different age or ethnicity or hair color. This can be problematic because the role replacement might not have the core values or characteristics that drove the positives in the relationship.
This is where personality comes in. Searching for role replacements based on underlying characteristics eliminates the most changeable variables and focuses on personality, which tends to be stable.
Especially in the workplace.
If you’re recruiting research assistants, you don’t want to assess them for height or musical preference. You want people who are detail oriented, conscientious, hardworking, motivated, and punctual, for example. Beyond finding someone who is good at performing a certain set of tasks (data analysis, after all, can be taught), you need to find someone who can excel in that role. “They don’t have to be like the person who left,” Ryne pointed out. That approach to employee replacement limits our thinking.
A real benefit of using personality tests for employee replacement is that you hire for the characteristics that are critical but avoid the characteristics that that are less important. “It’s about reexamining the role before you determine who you’re going to hire,” Blake said. If you’re only looking for another Roberto, you might miss the fact that Casey has all the characteristics to do the job well.
The Dangers of Role Replacement Bias
Aside from the potentially discriminatory situation we already mentioned, role replacement for opposite characteristics can be even more problematic. You can end up tossing out necessary characteristics for the role in an effort to run away from a specific aspect that was toxic or challenging.
“For example, if you had a bad boss who happened to be female, you might go, ‘Oh, I could never work for a woman again,’” Brad said. But what actually made the boss bad was her narcissism, not her sex or gender.
Honestly, this disinterest is very, very difficult to accomplish. Our intuition is not usually reliable. Role replacement bias can be linked to traumatic memory. Certain mannerisms, for instance, might dispose you to prejudge someone because they remind you of a problematic coworker.
Despite that, Brad was clear that women’s intuitions about men are definitely noteworthy. “If someone says, ‘That guy creeps me out,’ it’s incumbent upon a thoughtful company to consider that enough of a trigger to enhance the background check,” he said. Pushing someone to work with somebody who creeps them out doesn’t seem like a wise way to build a good corporate culture.
Police Officers, Lawyers, and Politicians
Brad and Chase Winterberg, JD, PhD, talent analytics consultant at Hogan, have researched role replacement as a societal experience. Our society has strong expectations of what police officers, attorneys, and politicians are all like, but these aren’t necessarily the characteristics that matter most in those jobs. A political candidate who talks loudly may not be more effective than one who listens well.
Police officers – Characteristics that matter most in police officers are neither aggression nor restraint, two societal stereotypes. Rather, valuing integrity and having the social and emotional skills to adapt to the situation were the baseline personality characteristics most desirable in police officers, Brad and Chase found.
Lawyers – Brad and Chase also reviewed characteristics of lawyers. Far from the societal stereotypes of slick-talking, competitive people, attorneys have successful characteristics as varied as the daily tasks they perform. Someone who seeks status can be successful in law, as can someone who is motivated by altruism. “It is an issue of matching what’s required for the job and identifying those characteristics that lead to success—not necessarily matching television stereotypes,” Brad said.
Politicians – Role replacement bias in politics can affect how people vote in elections too. They may vote for someone who is perceived as the opposite of the incumbent, or they may consider nonessential, stereotypical characteristics as critical for the job. Remarking on the lack of women US presidents, Brad said, “When our intuitions judge people, we see age, gender, and race get in the way of essential characteristics that are housed in many amazing women.”
Effective Employee Replacement
First, analyze the personality characteristics that are needed for success in a role. Use a model of personality, such as the Big 5, or an assessment tool to help, and be sure to include values too. The process of naming the characteristics can also clarify what needs the role replacement must fulfill and what might be outsourced to a different role.
Then, prioritize one or two characteristics. To narrow down candidates, focus on the core personality characteristic or value whose absence might make someone potentially unsuccessful in the role. That is, if the police officer candidates don’t value integrity, they can be eliminated because they’re unlikely to succeed.
Next, don’t get caught up in comparing characteristics that may be important but aren’t absolutely essential. Make your selection based on who’s best according to the most critical one or two characteristics, Brad advised. That is, the optimal officer candidate has the greatest combination of valuing integrity and emotional intelligence.
Hire an employee replacement because she is candid, not because she is another Candace.
Listen to this conversation in full on episode 57 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts. Cheers, everybody!
PS: Brad is a three-time Science of Personality guest. Listen to our two other conversations in episode 38 and episode 6.
The typical stress management method of Saudi corporate leaders can hurt rather than help the corporation, a Saudi Arabia-focused survey by Hogan Assessments reveals. The survey examined the personalities and values of 7,000 corporate leaders in Saudi Arabia.
According to Hogan Managing Director Zsolt Fehér, leaders in the countries neighboring Saudi Arabia tend to create corporate cultures of oppression, risky behavior, and confrontation under stress. This may lead to failure in a difficult economic situation. Comparatively, leaders in Saudi Arabia build on strategic thinking, employee motivation, and loss minimization. Saudi leaders successfully increase the efficiency of their enterprises and contribute to the strategy of the country on a macro level.
In everyday life managers and top leaders in Saudi Arabia show exemplary leadership skills and appear determined, balanced, goal oriented and cooperative. But Hogan’s experts found that, in crises or periods of overload, managers and senior leaders may make the wrong decisions from an economic perspective.
“The main downside we discovered is that Saudi managers are inclined to put their own needs first and, at the same time, to suppress others’. Furthermore, they take on too much risk or pile up unfinished ideas and ignore the suggestions of others. When faced with long-lasting periods of stress and critical choices, the result is a series of conflicts which can lead to derailing the leader,” said Fehér. “Sadly, this is not the worst-case scenario. The situation generated by the condition of stressed-out leaders and the lack of a supportive atmosphere can make it impossible for whole teams or business units to work properly, and the impact of such executive-level damage can ruin the whole company.”
The results also show that Saudi leaders are ambitious, which means they are competitive, determined, and results oriented. But the most unique feature of Saudi business leaders is an above-average inquisitiveness. They avoid getting stuck in small problems and instead focus on the future and reaching goals. The assessments also found these leaders possess an affinity for building on the strengths of others.
“It is important to highlight that Saudi leaders are highly profit oriented, metrics driven, and altruistic. While their own remuneration is of key importance to them, they can strongly represent their companies’ financial interest while supporting their peers,” said Fehér, summing up the national results. “Consequently, they will have done their jobs well—and this is exponentially true in critical situations—if there is a stress-relieving, supportive background and if they are motivated financially as well. Based on all this information, we have learned that a skilled Saudi leader can add value to a corporation by growing productivity that can be considered a regional competitive advantage for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”
