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

Everyone has made a bad hire. In fact, research shows that more than half of new employees fail. In the third installment of our new video series “Drinks with Hogan”, Global Alliances Consultant Dustin Hunter briefly walks us through using personality assessments in a selection context.

Buros Center for Testing, an independent organization that publishes authoritative reviews and reference materials on commercial assessments, recently released a review of the Hogan Development Survey.

“The assessment industry is unregulated, and there are thousands of assessment providers on the market, which can make it hard for consumers to find a quality assessment that suits their needs,” said Jeff Foster, vice president of science at Hogan Assessments. “We rely on organizations like Buros to help consumers identify quality assessments.”

“The HDS is alone in its test space and it has been developed with exceptional psychological and psychometric care,” states a portion of the review. “The care that went into developing the HDS as a psychometrically adequate and user-friendly tool for aiding personnel selection and professional growth lives up to the need,” it continues.

The review will appear in The Nineteenth Mental Measurements Yearbook, which includes consumer-oriented test reviews and will be available for purchase March 21, and may be pre-ordered here. The full review is also available for $15 on Buros’ site.

For more information about finding the right assessment for your company, check out our Assessment Evaluation Guide.

Who wouldn’t want a higher level of emotional intelligence?

“Studies have shown that a high emotional quotient (or EQ) boosts career success, entrepreneurial potential, leadership talent, health, relationship satisfaction, humor, and happiness,” says Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic.

We sat down with the VP of Innovation and Research to pick his thoughts on emotional intelligence. Here’s what he had to say…

It’s not a secret that people with higher EQ are more rewarding to deal with. Is it possible to raise our EQ?

Your level of EQ is firm, but not rigid. Our ability to identify and manage our own and others’ emotions is fairly stable over time, influenced by our early childhood experiences and even genetics. That doesn’t mean we can’t change it, but, realistically, long-term improvements will require a great deal of dedication and guidance.

Does EQ change over time?

Fortunately, EQ tends to increase with age, even without deliberate interventions. That’s the technical way to say that (most people) mature with age. The bottom line is that some people are just naturally more grumpy, shy, self-centered or insecure, while other people are blessed with natural positivity, composure, and people-skills. However, no human behavior is unchangeable.

Do EQ coaching programs work?

Yes. Although no program can get someone from 0 to 100%, a well-designed coaching intervention can easily achieve improvements of 25%. Various meta-analyses suggest that the most coachable element of EQ is interpersonal skills — with average short-term improvements of 50%. Think of it as teaching negotiation and social etiquette — what the great Dale Carnegie called “how to win friends and influence people.”

So we can learn empathy?

Even empathy can be trained in adults. The most compelling demonstration comes from neuropsychological studies highlighting the “plasticity” of the social brain. These studies suggest that, with adequate training, people can become more pro-social, altruistic, and compassionate.

Which is easier to change – reputation or identity?

Everyone can change, but few people are seriously willing to try. Think about the worst boss you ever had — how long would it take him to start coming across as more considerate, sociable, calm or positive? And that’s the easier part — changing one’s reputation. It is even harder to change one’s internal EQ; in other words, you might still feel stressed out or angry on the inside, even if you manage not to show those emotions on the outside.

Are individuals good judges of EQ?

Most of us are generally unaware of how others see us — and this especially true for managers. A recent meta-analysis shows that the relationship between self- and other-ratings of EQ is weak (weaker, even, than for IQ). In other words, we may not have a very accurate idea of how smart we are, but our notion of how nice we are is even less accurate. Thus any intervention focused on increasing EQ must begin by helping people understand what their real strengths and weaknesses are.. 

Are certain people more changeable than others?

Yes, some people are more capable of changing than others. Ironically, those individuals tend to be more pessimistic about their very chances of changing. Indeed, neurotic, introverted and insecure people are more likely to change, whereas highly adjusted and resilient individuals are less changeable. Likewise, optimism breeds overconfidence and hinders change by perpetuating false hopes and unrealistic expectations. There is an old joke about how many psychologists it takes to change a light bulb. Just one — so long as the light bulb wants to change.

Besides coaching, how can we improve our EQ?

The recipe for self-change is fairly straightforward — it is just hard to implement. In order to change, we need to start by building self-awareness, which is best achieved by obtaining (and believing) honest and critical feedback from others. Next, we must come up with a realistic strategy that focuses on attainable goals, such as changing a few specific behaviors (e.g., more eye contact, less shouting, more smiling, etc.) rather than substantial aspects of our personality (e.g., interpersonal sensitivity, empathy, and sociability). Finally, we will need an enormous amount of effort and dedication in order to both attain and maintain any desired changes — or we will quickly revert to our old habits.

Dr. Robert Hogan, president of Hogan Assessment Systems, will receive The Career Achievement Award at this year’s Association of Test Publishers’ (ATP) Innovations in Testing Conference. The conference, which fosters innovation by showcasing the latest technologies and collaborators, will be held March 2-5 in Arizona. The Career Achievement Award honors individuals who have made sustained and positive contributions to the development, application and innovations in testing and measurement through research, publications, presentations, professional activities, technology, conceptualizations, or theoretical contributions over a career.

You can view past recipients of the Career Achievement Award on ATP’s Wall of Honor.

On March 3, Dr. Hogan will present Personality Theory and Assessment: Predicting Career Success and Organizational Effectiveness in a preapproved invited session for the I/O Division. He will discuss personality theory and assessment, identity versus reputation, and faking. He will also reveal the reason why people are the most consequential and dangerous forces in our environment and, ultimately, why the critics are wrong about personality measurement. Read more and find out who else will be presenting by downloading ATP’s Innovations in Testing program book found on its website.

Hogan’s scientific foundation and commitment to research distinguishes us from the competition. Each year, Hogan and our affiliates publish works that contribute to the knowledge and development of (a) the Hogan assessments and (b) the field of personality and psychology. These publications build the Hogan brand and allow us to better serve our clients worldwide.

Hogan employees work to promote our brand through publishing in well- known academic outlets and presenting at professional conferences. Also, we leverage the Hogan Academic Network, a group of researchers, professors, and students across the globe, to disseminate Hogan-related research through theses, dissertations, peer-reviewed journals, and professional conferences.

This year has been no exception to our commitment to progressing the science of personality. This list details Hogan-related publications and presentations from 2013. Take a look.