“Why can’t we make more, and why can’t we make it sooner?” asked Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla of his manufacturing leader, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article.¹ The article goes on to describe and praise Bourla’s demanding leadership style, a decided departure from the popular press on more gentle approaches to leadership.² Pfizer’s stellar performance in delivering the COVID-19 vaccine was driven, in part, by Mr. Bourla’s impatience. This raises a critical question: have we swung too far toward celebrating a kinder, gentler approach to leadership and lost sight of the balance required to produce results and engage employees’ hearts and minds?

For at least several centuries, patience has been considered a virtue. Articles and books about patience almost universally seem to assume that more is better. As children, we are taught to be patient (e.g., “Wait your turn,” and “Good things come to those who wait”). Even the Cambridge Dictionary’s definition rests on the assumption that more is better: “the ability to wait, or to continue doing something despite difficulties, or to suffer without complaining or becoming annoyed.”³

However, it also has been suggested that patience is a vice. For example, Parkinson’s law states that work expands to fill the time available. That is, being patient (and therefore slow) will result in wasted time; if one doesn’t exhibit impatience for getting things done, those tasks will take more time than necessary. Horstman’s corollary to Parkinson’s law, on the other hand, states that work contracts to fit the time we give it, which also suggests that a bit of impatience leads to greater efficiency. More practically, consider whether patience is productive in the case of a manager who, unlike Mr. Bourla, patiently waits for work to be completed instead of setting aggressive deadlines. Would patience be productive or unproductive for an entrepreneur trying to be first to market with a new product? The current popularity of agility and digitalization certainly doesn’t seem to characterize patience as a virtue.

So how can we tell which it is — a virtue or a vice — in a given circumstance? Unfortunately, and surprisingly, the academic literature doesn’t provide an answer. To gain insight, we reviewed correlations between personality characteristics and observer descriptions of patience.

Certain personality characteristics seem most related to observer descriptions of patience or impatience. These Hogan Personality Inventory scales measure those characteristics:

• Adjustment – measuring the degree to which one is seen as calm and even tempered or conversely moody and volatile
• Interpersonal Sensitivity – measuring social skill, tact, and perceptiveness or conversely independence, frankness, and directness
• Prudence – measuring self-control and conscientiousness versus impulsivity, flexibility, and resistance to rules and supervision

More patient people are described as being calmer, more polite and tactful, and more self-disciplined. Sounds good, right? So we might conclude that patience really is a virtue — except our research also shows that one can have too much of a good thing when it comes to these personality characteristics. For example, a person who scores extremely high on each of the three scales might be described a bit differently:

• Adjustment – lacking a sense of urgency and being nonchalant about priority assignments
• Interpersonal Sensitivity – avoiding confrontation, being overfocused on getting along, and hesitating to address poor performance
• Prudence – controlling, having difficulty managing change, micromanaging, and seeming rigid and inflexible

Thus, extremely patient people might be inefficient, tentatively communicate expectations for results, and lack adaptability. Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing, and patience can be a virtue or a vice.

Personality assessment or 360-degree feedback is critical for helping leaders understand if they are hitting the sweet spot in terms of patience — being even tempered and urgent, diplomatic and direct, and conscientious and adaptable. Demonstrating these characteristics in balance seems likely to earn one a reputation of having the virtue of being productively impatient.

Want to learn more about personality tests? Check out The Ultimate Guide to Personality Tests

References

1. Hopkins, JS. (2020, December 11). How Pfizer Delivered a Covid Vaccine in Record Time: Crazy Deadlines, a Pushy CEO. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-pfizer-delivered-a-covid-vaccine-in-record-time-crazy-deadlines-a-pushy-ceo-11607740483?mod=searchresults_pos16&page=1

2. Feintzeig, R. (2020, December 3). The Covid Pandemic Produces a Kinder, Gentler Performance Review. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid-pandemic-produces-a-kinder-gentler-performance-review-11607025600

3. Cambridge University Press. (n.d.). Patience. In Cambridge Dictionary. Retrieved February 23, 2021, from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/patience

People sometimes ask whether using personality assessment for selection will create an organization full of clones, decrease diversity, and narrow the range of innovative thought available to solve company problems. Their concern is that if they hire people with similar personality characteristics, they will create a culture of groupthink. Some assessment providers have fostered this view by (a) suggesting that personality assessment can enable you to clone your best workers’ personalities by hiring more like them, and (b) arguing that would be a good thing. Neither is true.

Because no two people have identical personalities, it is not possible to create a workforce of personality clones, regardless of the assessment used. We can’t clone personalities; even identical twins, who share 100% of their DNA don’t have identical personalities. The concern about personality assessment creating a workforce of clones is simply misguided.

When selection is done right, the core focus is on understanding and predicting future performance on job requirements, not on the personalities of existing workers. Any professionally developed selection process starts with conducting a job analysis, which is a systematic process for identifying the core requirements of the job. Although job analysis can help understand and specify the characteristics required for successful performance, its focus is on job requirements, not on duplicating the personalities of current employees.

Although research shows that personality predicts many different work and life outcomes, not all personality characteristics predict all outcomes. Effectively using personality assessment for hiring is based on identifying core job requirements and then identifying the subset of personality characteristics that predict performance on those requirements.

Personality consists of many facets, and the key is understanding which facets predict which performance outcomes. Hogan’s research archive contains thousands of data points that demonstrate the links between requirements of different jobs and the personality characteristics that predict success in each of them. Because different jobs require different personality characteristics, using personality assessment promotes personality diversity across the organization.

Let’s assume we have a job that requires positive customer relations, following systematic procedures, and resilience in the face of heavy workloads. Job analysis would help us scientifically identify and show evidence that those three requirements are more important than others.

Now let’s assume that we use a personality assessment to measure characteristics related to positive customer relations, following systematic procedures, and resilience and that we create an algorithm to combine measures of those characteristics into a final score to use for hiring decisions. We’re basing those decisions on personality characteristics we know will lead to better performance and, equally as important, we are ignoring lots of other personality characteristics that we could measure, but that we know aren’t important for success in this particular job. If we do that well, we would hire candidates who are interpersonally skilled, rule-following, and resilient but who also could be outgoing or quiet, visionary or tactical, leaderlike or comfortable following others, and/or decisive or cautious, to name a few possibilities. Although those candidates might resemble other successful people in the job on certain personality characteristics, they also would bring a diverse set of characteristics.

Using personality assessment for selection will not create clones. In fact, using personality assessment makes it more likely that you will have employees who are similar in ways that matter for job performance but who are diverse in many other characteristics and behaviors. In addition, because personality doesn’t systematically measure differences in race, gender, age, and other demographic characteristics, you can confidently use personality to hire the best employees while also hiring a diverse workforce that will bring differing personalities, perspectives, life experiences, demographics, and ideas to your company.

During the past few months, we all have experienced heartbreaking events and challenges related to the COVID-19 pandemic. During the past two weeks, it has become impossible to ignore another crisis, which the American Psychological Association labeled a “racism pandemic.” Sadly, the racism pandemic has been and continues to be a much more enduring, primary, intractable, and destructive one, which most recently was highlighted by the murder of George Floyd by a police officer.

This double pandemic intensifies our typical yearning for meaning. Considering the recent death and destruction, we might be tempted to conclude that there is nothing we can do to make things better. Like many of you, I have spent a lot of time thinking about Hogan’s history of commitment to social justice, and it is critical that this commitment is not only part of our history, but also our future. It is poignant that Hogan’s headquarters is located in an area once known as Black Wall Street that has a history of racial violence — because even before the official founding of Hogan, antidiscrimination and equal opportunity were core values and drivers of action for our founders.

For example, during the 1960s protests in Berkeley, Robert Hogan proposed and carried out research to improve police officer selection, despite being met with indifference (at best) from other researchers. His focus on research to improve social justice became an enduring one. Throughout her career, Joyce Hogan worked with the Department of Justice on many high-profile discrimination cases to create more equitable opportunities for women in traditionally male-dominated fields, such as heavy industry and police and fire departments.

Robert and Joyce started Hogan Assessments with a vision to create equal opportunity in the workplace. The confluence of three factors provided an opportune moment:

1. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made discrimination in the hiring process illegal.
2. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was established to enforce the antidiscrimination part of the Civil Rights Act.
3. The mainstream field of I/O psychology primarily focused on using IQ tests for selection, despite clear evidence that such tests discriminated against minority applicants.

Through the Hogans’ early research and the research that continues today, Hogan has shown again and again that personality measures predict performance across all jobs — without creating unfair discrimination based on demographic or non-job-related variables. Using personality measures in selection helps ensure that the best person for the job gets the job. That is key to social justice.

Aside from the ongoing and daily impact of the fairness of our approach, we continue to do research and seek opportunities to put our assessments to work in ways that benefit all. For example, we are actively engaged in research and proposals to improve hiring practices for law enforcement. This week, we put a small team together to expand use of our research and assessments in public safety settings, and we recently worked with a partner to implement a diversity and inclusion assessment for leaders.

Today, our impact on social justice is global. Even in countries where discrimination based on race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or social status is condoned or overlooked, companies that use our assessments are providing fair evaluations of job applicants, even if unwittingly so.

If, like me, you have been struggling over the past couple of weeks about what you can do to reject discrimination and support equality, you can be confident that our collective work at Hogan promotes social justice every day and in every region of the world. Social justice is not just our history. It is alive, critical, and a calling in which we all can find meaning.

Of course, we can and should do more collectively and individually to address this pandemic of racism and discrimination. But let’s at least take a brief moment to reflect on our founding principles. Let’s reaffirm Hogan’s commitment to social justice, antiracism, and equal opportunity for all. And let’s remember how our work every day is an opportunity to continue the principled action that Robert and Joyce started. Clearly, we have a lot of work left to do.

Last weekend, I did something I never thought I’d do. I donned personal protective equipment to run a basic errand. I put on gloves and a mask, and in spite of the warm spring weather, I even wore long sleeves to cover as much of my skin as possible. It felt like I was walking into an operatory for surgery, not like I was walking into a liquor store to pick up a bottle of wine.

Despite the near-constant news regarding preventing the spread of the coronavirus, the salesperson in the liquor store wore no mask or gloves. He folded, refolded, creased, and re-creased the paper bag holding my purchase multiple times. By the time he finished, he had touched every square inch of the bag with his bare hands. A few months ago, I might have found his behavior a little obsessive. But considering the pandemic, the way he handled the bag, coupled with his lack of personal protective equipment, seemed dangerous. He interacts with hundreds of people per day — sometimes from behind a plexiglass shield but often by helping people find their favorite wine, which can involve handing bottles back and forth.

In April, more than 20% of consumers polled by Morning Consult indicated that they would not feel comfortable going out to eat, to a shopping mall, to a movie or theater performance, or to the gym for at least six months.¹ A recent International Food Information Council Foundation survey assessed consumers’ opinions about essential workers’ attention to safety. Of those who responded, 43% said that frequently wiping down commonly touched surfaces was important, 28% said that it was important to them for employees to wear gloves, and another 28% said masks were important to them.² If consumers perceive that front-line or essential workers are not attending to safety, their reluctance to shop may linger or even increase.

Safety: A Matter of Personality

So why would someone ignore basic safety precautions that so many people are concerned about? Because some people are more attentive to safety than others, and this is related to personality. Hogan’s research has identified six safety competencies that impact the prevalence of unsafe behaviors and on-the-job accidents. With our Safety report, we measure these safety competencies using the following scales:

Defiant – Compliant

Those who score high on this scale tend to adhere to organizational guidelines and are usually rule followers. Those on the defiant end of the scale often ignore authority and rules and can be reckless, causing accidents and injuries.

Panicky – Strong

Those who lean toward the panicky end of the scale often buckle under pressure and make mistakes that could prove to be costly or possibly even fatal. Those at the strong end of the spectrum are steady under pressure.

Irritable – Cheerful

Cheerful employees keep their temperament on an even keel, but those who are prone to irritability make mistakes by not staying focused.

Distractible – Vigilant

Those who remain focused on the task at hand usually score on the vigilant side of this scale and tend to be safer than those who are easily distracted.

Reckless – Cautious

Those who score on the reckless end of the scale tend to take unnecessary risks. Cautious scorers evaluate their options before making risky decisions.

Arrogant – Trainable

Low scorers tend to be arrogant, overconfident, and challenging to train. High scorers tend to be trainable, listen to advice, and enjoy learning.

Protection for Public Health

Screening employees for these safety competencies can help organizations do their part to keep their customers safe and flatten the epidemiological curve. As more state and local governments lift their shutdown orders, many business owners are finding themselves in positions to decide whether (or to what extent) they should reopen. When they do so, they assume some responsibility for the health of the public.

Many businesses are implementing enhanced sanitation protocols and new policies regarding personal protective equipment and social distancing. The success of these efforts relies on front-line employees being both safety conscious and trainable. Being able to identify employees whose personalities predispose them to be more attentive to safety can help mitigate the risk of inadvertent disease transmission through day-to-day business operations.

Protection for Your Business

Aside from helping to protect public health, screening staff for these safety competencies can also be good for business. Right now, consumers want businesses to be vigilant about safety. By knowing who will be more or less inclined to take it seriously, organizations can dramatically reduce costs associated with unsafe behavior and potentially increase customers’ willingness to shop, order takeout food, or use a delivery service.

These savings will add up, especially for businesses in industries affected most directly by the current economic crisis. We’ve estimated the comprehensive effect that the Hogan Safety report has had historically by analyzing our data on the reports we’ve generated for our clients, data on the report’s accuracy in distinguishing safe employees from their less-safe colleagues, and the most recent government statistics on workplace accidents. Our research shows a whopping $43.7 million USD in safety-related savings to organizations and an estimated ROI of 538% from using the Hogan Safety report.

Although employees’ safety precautions won’t necessarily increase the number of consumers who visit a store or use a service, unsafe employee behaviors will almost certainly have a negative impact on the bottom line. More importantly, the health of the public is at stake. It is time to ensure you are hiring and coaching employees who will be attentive to their own, their coworkers’, and their customers’ safety. Your future business may depend on it.

* Click here to register for our next webinar, “Safety Is No Accident – Using Personality to Improve the Safety of Your Organization,” on Thursday, June 4, hosted by Hogan’s Kristin Switzer and Kirsten Mosier.

References

1. Meyers, A. (2020, April 10). When consumers say they’ll feel OK about dining out and other activities. Morning Consult. https://morningconsult.com/2020/04/10/consumer-expectations-normal-activities-comfortable
2. International Food Information Council Foundation. (2020, April 14). Consumer survey: COVID-19’s impact on food purchasing, eating behaviors, and perceptions of food safety. https://foodinsight.org/consumer-survey-covid-19s-impact-on-food-purchasing

Even during the best of times, research shows that absentee leadership is quite common and destructive to teams and organizations. What’s an absentee leader? One who displays neither actively positive leadership nor actively negative leadership; an absentee leader seems uninvolved and uncommunicative. For leaders whose teams are all working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, the possibility of showing up as an absentee leader increases, even for leaders who typically are engaged with their teams in the office.

Employees whose leaders are absentee report less direction, delayed decisions, and a lack of feedback and involvement. Role ambiguity results, along with decreased job satisfaction, higher intentions to leave, and added conflicts with co-workers. Add to that the increased stress of the pandemic, and negative outcomes for organizations and employees could be exponentially increased.

Communication is key. There are many readily available tips for managers regarding the common pitfalls resulting from virtual distance between workers and leaders. There are also many useful aids for communicating more effectively with remote teams. A focus on communication undoubtedly is critical for managers at all times, especially now.

However, absentee leadership is about the impact of a manager’s engagement (or lack thereof) with his/her work and team. Hogan’s research reveals five key indicators of absentee leadership. Each of these provides clues on what managers can do to avoid falling into the trap of developing a reputation as an absentee leader, even as they are forced to work and lead remotely.

1. Motivation for leadership.

If you are a manager who is feeling relieved that you don’t have to interact face-to-face for a while, that might be a danger sign. To avoid letting contact diminish, schedule quick check-in calls with team members more frequently than you normally would. Having scheduled check-ins will help provide the discipline needed to ensure that your sense of relief doesn’t mean that you are providing less leadership. Ensure you are focused on providing guidance, coaching, and performance feedback. Have a clear agenda for your calls with individual team members.

2. Lack of engagement with the team.

This one may seem obvious, but overcommunicate your availability and communication preferences to the team. Let them know you are still here to help. Consider blocking a set time each day as “open door time,” during which your team knows you are available for a quick question, a needed decision, or to address a concern. Providing more structure in this way will help set expectations and reassure your team that they can get the timely answers they need.

3. Lack of general career engagement.

Some leaders may be experiencing an existential struggle about whether their current job or even career is the right one for them. During this unusual time, however, try to focus on the greater good. Your team is counting on you, so try to set aside personal concerns and focus on supporting your team. Focusing your energy on them right now may help you find an increased sense of purpose.

4. Lacking effort to motivate and inspire.

In normal, in-office times, you may have regular staff meetings. If so, research shows that they probably aren’t very effective or efficient. That can be especially true for virtual team meetings, so it is critical to have a crisp agenda that is shared in advance, timebound topics, and clear decisions and owners as the meeting closes. These things will help instill a sense of productivity and purpose for the team, even as the world around them seems to be changing by the moment. In addition, it may be useful to schedule a team meeting here and there just as a time for team members to decompress. Everyone is under increased stress and perhaps isolation. It may help your team for you to be deliberately vulnerable in some ways, to share your thoughts and questions and to encourage theirs. While you may not get to answers, this may deepen relationships on the team in ways that are beneficial now and in the future. You may think this is just “soft stuff,” but actually it is about a key ingredient to effective leadership – building trust.

5. Lacking persistence for driving better outcomes.

Undoubtedly, some workers will see this remote-working time as an opportunity to slack off. Most, however, are likely to be looking for ways to be highly productive and to help their companies come out of this crisis in a strong position. This is where listening becomes especially important for leaders. Think about ways to engage your team in discussions about actions that may be different from their typical work, but that might be even more productive now. Look for ways to engage your team in making process improvements, increasing efficiencies, cutting costs, or doing business in new ways. You don’t have to have the answers; it likely is more important to ask questions, listen, and to engage the team in shared ownership of driving better outcomes despite abnormal circumstances.

The current situation is a test for the effectiveness of leaders and their teams. As always, evaluate the strength of your leadership by the effectiveness of your team. The above five points will help ensure that you develop and sustain a reputation for being an engaged, effective leader, even during this unprecedented period in which we are suddenly required to work differently. Remember to communicate frequently, create additional structure, actively support more frequently than usual, and listen to and leverage the power of your team.

There are numerous perspectives and fundamental disagreement about the true definition of leadership. The good news is, most definitions of leadership fit into two broad categories. On one hand, we can think of a person who has a supervisory or management title as being a leader. On the other hand, we can think of a person who supports and guides a group to work toward common goals as being a leader. The first definition is based on a person’s formal role within an organization. The second definition is based on the function the leader serves and the group’s outcome.

Most books about leadership either explicitly or implicitly define leadership in terms of who is in charge, as does much of the academic study of leadership. The assumption is that leadership is about the position rather than the person. How do you know someone is a leader? You see if they have a title that implies they are in a leadership role. How do you study leadership to understand what it is about? You find people who are in leadership positions and study what they are doing. Who writes books about leadership? People who have been in leadership positions. Whose leadership books get published? Those who have had leadership titles in companies with recognizable brands. How does one get better at leadership? They read those books. The authors must know something about leadership, because they have been in leadership positions, right?

Maybe not. A large global survey of employee attitudes toward management found that less than half of respondents trust their boss. Another study suggests that about 50% of employees who quit their jobs do so because of their managers. Moreover, research indicates that somewhere between 30%-60% of those in leadership roles are actively destructive to their organizations. Based on these abysmal statistics it is likely that many authors of popular leadership books are part of the problem, not the answer. We can’t assume that people who are or have been in leadership roles can tell us much about how to be effective leaders. 

If you really want to understand what leadership is about, it is useful to start with three fundamentals about humans. First, we are biologically wired to live in groups. Second, because we are group-living, we are motivated to get along with other people because there is safety in numbers. Third, we are also hard-wired to compete for resources because better food and access to other resources maximizes our individual chance for survival.

People are inherently driven by two competing motives that can destroy group success. We all need to get along, but we also need to get ahead. Those needs are at odds, and when unmanaged in groups, the groups fail. The most successful groups are able to get along and get ahead. 

People rarely are balanced across these two motives. Some may be overly careful about going along with the group to avoid conflict. If the group is overly focused on harmony, it likely will lack direction. They may be happy and kind to each other, but they may not accomplish much. Others may be overly competitive in a way that destroys group harmony. If group members are focused on competing with each other, the group likely will be directionless because of competing perspectives. Only when both motives are managed and balanced within the group can it achieve safety in numbers and access to the resources necessary for survival. That was true thousands of years ago for groups living in caves, and it remains true today in the modern corporate world.

Leveraging Personality to Define Leadership

A more productive way to define leadership is about group outcomes. The purpose of leadership is to help group members balance needs for getting along and getting ahead in a way that maximizes the group’s success. If we define leadership as helping the group to succeed, suddenly a title or position becomes irrelevant. 

There is a great deal of high-quality research on the personality characteristics of effective leaders. Essentially, there are three aspects of personality that impact leadership ability:

1. The Bright Side – This describes day-to-day work reputation, and characteristics like drive, emotional resilience, and one’s ability to work well with a variety of people. This is particularly important for leadership success. 
2. The Dark Side – These are characteristics that can be overused, especially when a leader is reacting in the moment, not self-managing, or stressed. These characteristics are known to interfere with communication and relationship-building, gaining buy-in and clarity on direction, and the ability to balance conformity with being flexible and independent-minded. 
3. The Inside (Values) – Although related to personality, values are different. They are more about one’s intentions or preferences and are key to the fit between a leader and his/her organization’s values.  For example, an individual who values and creates a culture of creativity and experimentation will not fit very well in a nuclear facility where processes and protocols must be followed precisely to ensure safety.

Personality predicts leadership ability. By using personality measures, you can gain insight into one’s ability to lead effectively, even if they’ve never been in a position of leadership. Understanding a person’s natural strengths and development needs concerning integrity, judgment, competence, and vision can help organizations strategically invest in development activities that will improve performance in leadership roles.

So, based on the points in this article, here are five essential things we know about leadership:

1. Leadership is about the ability to guide and help a group to achieve its goals. It’s not about a title or position.
2. Leading is about providing a group with direction and making sure the group works together to pursue that direction.
3. The ultimate test of whether one is a leader is whether one’s group is successful.
4. It is largely unimportant whether one thinks they are a leader, but it is critically important whether others think they are.
5. Leadership effectiveness is not a mystery. Understanding the similarities and gaps between one’s personality characteristics and those related to leadership success can provide one with the strategic insight to lead effectively.

The idea of transformational leadership sounds good when taken at face value. A transformational leader is someone who instills pride, respect and trust in its followers. They inspire and motivate people beyond expectations, sparking innovation and change. And, if you look up “transformation” in the dictionary, you will see it defined as “a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance.” So, what organization wouldn’t want to introduce some form of transformational leadership to respond to the disruption caused by the current digital revolution?

Although transformational leadership seems like a good idea in theory, it is nothing more than charismatic leadership with a different and more appealing name. A recent study published by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology shows that there is plenty to dislike about charismatic leadership. In fact, there is little evidence to show that there is a strong correlation between charisma and effective leadership. So, because charismatic leadership and transformational leadership are essentially the same thing, it’s important to understand how this style of leadership has been so widely adopted across the globe.

According to another study published by the Academy of Management, “there is a widely shared consensus that charismatic–transformational leadership is a particularly effective form of leadership.” However, there are some major issues with this assumption, given that this leadership style is fundamentally flawed. There should instead be a shift towards a new and more empirically defined form of leadership, where leaders are appointed based on capability and skill as opposed to charisma.  

First, it is widely assumed that leadership is defined as “a person who has a leadership or managerial title.” The problem with that definition is that it doesn’t address how that person assumed the leadership position in the first place. Organizations across the world are notorious for promoting charismatic and politically savvy employees into leadership roles because they seem leaderlike. Some people can charm their superiors into thinking they would be effective leaders. They tend to be confident, creative, charming, and flashy, which helps them stand out in comparison with their peers. However, although their personality makes them seem “transformative,” in reality they are often ineffective leaders.

Second, there are several inconsistencies when it comes to measuring leader effectiveness. In a 2008 study conducted by Robert B. Kaiser, Robert Hogan, and S. Bartholomew Craig, the authors outlined these inconsistencies. For example, some organizations measure leadership effectiveness through manager evaluations. Others measure it through subordinate evaluations. Some are based solely on financial results. This diversity in methodology has delivered mixed results, essentially making any conclusions on leader effectiveness inconclusive. Therefore, there is often no real evidence connecting hiring or promoting charismatic-transformational leaders with improved organizational results.

Third, because charismatic-transformational leadership has been deemed by so many to be an effective form of leadership, there is a presumed “fear” among researchers to debunk this myth, which is ironic. If there is evidence to suggest that this leadership style is ineffective, yet nobody wants to go against popular consensus, wouldn’t calling out these “experts” be transformative in and of itself?

The bottom line is that charismatic-transformational leadership is prevalent in organizations on a global scale, but there is little evidence to suggest it is effective. This leads us to one crucial question that organizations everywhere should be asking: How successful could we be if we did not assume that charismatic-transformational leadership leads to leadership effectiveness?

This is a complex problem with a simple solution: Define leadership correctly and then identify effective leaders through the use of valid personality assessments.

You cannot define leadership as someone who is in a managerial role or someone who has been promoted simply because he or she is inspiring and socially confident. You have to define leadership as a person who builds and maintains a high-performing team. When organizations do that, they have a completely different view of what makes for an effective leader.

Then, through the use of valid and reliable assessment measures, they can better identify those who will be successful. One of the characteristics that organizations need to look for in leaders is humility. Effective leaders are more modest; they focus on team performance and are willing to admit mistakes, share credit and learn from others. These are the type of leaders that can inspire true positive change and innovation.

Recent EEOC agreements with two major US companies have once again raised concerns about adverse impact resulting from personality assessment use in hiring. Just as every automobile, electrical appliance, or medicine can negatively impact people’s lives if manufactured poorly or used improperly, assessments can be poorly developed, haphazardly applied, or purposefully misused to negatively and unfairly impact peoples’ lives and employment. At Hogan, we agree with the EEOC’s investigation and intervention on behalf of plaintiffs when any selection procedure results in unfair hiring practices, because our research shows that well-developed assessments predict job performance and that well-developed personality measures help companies make fair hiring decisions.

There are two key issues to consider when using any pre-hire assessment or test, and at Hogan, we encourage assessment users to attend closely to them. The first is validity. The validity of a test or assessment regards the predictions that can be made from it. The key issue in pre-hire assessment is whether there is scientific evidence that the assessment predicts job performance, turnover, safety behaviors, or other relevant business outcomes for a job or job family. Note the following from the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (1978).

Nothing in these guidelines is intended or should be interpreted as discouraging the use of a selection procedure for the purpose of determining qualifications or for the purpose of selection on the basis of relative qualifications, if the selection procedure had been validated in accord with these guidelines for each such purpose for which it is to be used. – Section 60-3, U.G.E.S.P. (1978); 43 FR 38295 (August 25, 1978).

Employers should demand validity evidence before they implement assessments, and that evidence should be produced in a way that reflects Uniform Guidelines requirements. Unfortunately, the assessment industry is unregulated, and many improperly developed assessments are sold and used without demonstrating that they predict anything of value. This is not only a legal issue; it is a practical one. Employers use assessments because they want to make better hires. Making better hires requires accurate prediction. Accurate prediction provides value to the company. Value is demonstrated through scientific evidence of validity.

Do Personality Assessments Discriminate?

However, an assessment can produce adverse impact or unfairness even when validation studies are professionally conducted. Hogan believes adverse impact and fairness are equally critical considerations for any assessment user, and there is ample research demonstrating that personality assessment, when properly developed and used, rarely results in adverse impact. Ethical assessment providers will provide evidence of validity and a statistical evaluation of the potential for adverse impact. Any assessment publisher who sidesteps or refuses to provide such evidence should be viewed with suspicion.

At Hogan, we believe every job candidate should be evaluated using valid and fair assessments. We have worked hard over the past 30 years to democratize access to employment by providing validation research that meets the highest professional standards and assessments that provide equal opportunity based on occupational qualifications. We welcome clients’ questions about validity and adverse impact and the opportunity to demonstrate our standard-setting approach on both fronts.

Want to learn more about personality tests? Check out The Ultimate Guide to Personality Tests