A recent article on ABC News’ website chronicles the story of a job seeker who is suing a potential employer for allegedly using personality assessments to support discriminatory hiring practices.

Here’s the gist, according to ABC News: A woman named Vicky Sandy applied for a job as a cashier, bagger and stocker at a Kroger supermarket in West Virginia. As part of the application process, she took a personality assessment designed to predict whether she would be friendly and communicate well with customers. Sandy, who is hearing- and speech-impaired, scored a 40 percent. Her post-test results showed that she was less likely than other applicants to "listen carefully, understand and remember" and suggested the job interviewer listen for "correct language" and "clear enunciation." She was not hired, and subsequently filed a discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Without knowing all of the details, we can’t comment on this specific case. But it brings up an important point. As more companies turn to personality assessments to help them with the hiring process, it is critical that those assessments are well validated, and that they are used properly.

At Hogan, we take enormous pride that our assessments have never been successfully challenged, and we provide our clients detailed information about the development and validation of each of our four assessments.

Dr. Kevin Meyer, a senior consultant in our global alliances division, explains it simply in his last blog post “The (Il)legality of Personality Assessment in Employee Selection.”

For the more complicated version, check out our white paper “Adverse Impact and the HPI.”

Popeye is self-aware.

Using Values Assessment to Create a More Engaged, More Productive Workforce

Even the best, most qualified candidate in the world could be detrimental to a company if his or her values aren’t a good fit for the job or company culture. For example, hiring someone that prefers a highly social environment and then isolating them in a single office at the end of the hall will most likely lead to another job search.

Download The Value of Values and discover the importance of values over experience when searching for the perfect hire.

Jon Bentz pioneered the study of managerial derailment when he launched a 30-year study of failed managers in the late 1970s at Sears. Bentz presented his research at the Center for Creative Leadership in the early 1980s. Bentz noted that they were uniformly bright and socially skilled; they failed because they:

• Lacked business skills
• Were unable to deal with complexity
• Were reactive and tactical
• Were unable to delegate
• Were unable to build a team
• Were unable to maintain relationships with a network of contacts
• Let emotions cloud their judgment
• Were seen as having an overriding personality defect

Inspired by Bentz’ findings, Morgan McCall and Michael Lombardo replicated and extended the study by interviewing senior executives and asking two questions, one about a successful executive and one about a derailed executive. In their findings, they defined derailed executives as “…people who were very successful in their careers (spanning 20-30 years and reaching very high levels) but who, in the eyes of the organization, did not live up to their full potential…” McCall and Lombardo published The Lessons of Experience in 1988. Although it was not the point of the book, it contained relevant, useful data on derailment. McCall and Lombardo focused on behaviors, circumstantial factors, and dynamics, rather than an overriding personality defect.

Hogan’s first published work on the dark side appeared in 1990 (Hogan, Raskin, & Fazini, 1990), and focused on one dimension of a taxonomy. In 1997, the first complete work on the derailment taxonomy was published in the Hogan Development Survey technical manual.

In 2003, David Dotlich and Peter Cairo suggest that everyone has derailment tendencies, but that CEOs are more vulnerable to them because of the pressure at the top of the pyramid, and that self-awareness can mitigate the influence of these tendencies on organizational effectiveness.

Rasch, Shen, Davies, and Bono (2008) offer a taxonomy of ineffective leadership behavior with three empirical findings warranting special attention: (a) they found no sex differences in the frequency of these behaviors, (b) the category of bad behavior that had the most toxic impact on staff morale was, “Failure to consider human needs,” (c) the frequency of this particular behavior increased with organizational status; the more senior the manager, the more abusive.

Most recently in 2011, a conclusive chapter on management derailment, personality assessment, and mitigation by Hogan, J., Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R. B was published in the APA Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (Vol. 3, 555-575). In this publication, Hogan et al. discuss the causes of incompetence, taxonomies of derailing characteristics, and factors for mitigating and preventing derailment.

In conclusion, the derailment research is based on a variety of methods and yields consistent findings across time, organizations, organizational levels, national culture, and even gender. The reasons managers fail all concern poor business performance, poor leadership, poor self-control, and especially, relationship problems. Moreover, the failure often occurs following major change and periods of increased stress. The reason these defects matter lies in the definition of leadership—which is the ability to build and maintain a team that can outperform the competition.

John F. Kennedy on leadership:

President Eisenhower on leadership:

Ever heard the phrase, “employees leave their bosses, not their jobs”? Bad managers are easy to spot, but good managers are more difficult to identify. Because staff engagement is most strongly linked to the behavior of leaders, it is paramount that we recognize what makes a good manager good and a bad manager bad.

Download Good Managers and learn the tipping point that distinguishes a good leader from a bad leader.

Are you convinced you are too busy to keep up with your inbox?

Do you regularly apologize to people after failing to return correspondence?

Does your staff send you multiple follow-up emails covering the same topic?

Technology helps teams connect instantly to members across the globe. Yet, there are many among us who routinely take more than 72 hours to return emails, if they return them at all. These “email black holes” cause serious bottlenecks in workflow and decision-making. Are you part of the problem?

Download our white paper for five reasons you may be creating an email black hole.

Every now and then we come across a piece of pop culture that perfectly captures what we do here at Hogan. This one is from the 1984 John Hughes classic, “The Breakfast Club.”

Enjoy.