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.

In a recent article on ABC News, Alan Farnham highlights the ranking of the fastest-growing occupations provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). I was pleasantly, while not completely, surprised to see that Industrial-Organizational Psychologists made the top of the list. The article highlights two important facts about the small size of the field: a) with the field only including around 1,600 psychologists, a 53% increase doesn’t result in as many jobs as other fields and b) not many people know much about the field.

It was refreshing to read an accurate and positive description of the field in the media for once. I recently read an article describing us as occupational therapists, which is very inaccurate, but a step past my peers thinking I read minds in the work place for a living. Beyond being a mouthful to say, I am often given a blank stare and a “What the heck is that?” when I mention that I am an Industrial-Organizational Psychologist.

Farnham describes I-O Psychologists as consultants that can be hired to improve the efficiency of an organization and that their contribution can be directly linked to improved business performance. This is a very important distinction because one of the most difficult jobs an I-O Psychologist faces is explaining what we do to non-I-O psychologists. Our job is very important in that we are not only seeking to improve the efficiency in an organization, but we must also remain agents of the court (keep companies from violating employment law). For the most part, this involves conducting rigorous research to find validation evidence to support our methods.

All of our R&D staff, as well as several of our consultants and coaches are I-O psychologists. As a Consultant on the R&D team at Hogan, I spend most of my time conducting selection research for domestic clients and multinational corporations. As Farnham mentioned, we are able to demonstrate causality between our contribution and business performance. Our assessments predict performance and we have the numbers to back it up. The hard part is putting this in a business language that can be used and understood by stakeholders in an organization. Companies that have dealt with I-O psychologists get it quickly. Companies new to the idea take longer to convince. Other scientists are often the most skeptical of psychologists calling themselves scientists. In the end, the numbers speak for themselves and our ability to provide return on investment (ROI) is valuable.  

It's difficult to find time to read every new piece of rersearch that could impact the I/O field. However, to be effective, it is important to stay up to date on current research. To help, the Hogan Research Division collects and summarizes important articles every quarter. Click on the authors' names for more information about the studies.

Withholding Bosses Kill Engagement
High scores on scales comprising the Hogan Development Survey’s moving-away factor are most harmful to engagement, job satisfaction, and burnout. High scores on scales comprising other HDS factors produce mixed results (Leary et al.).

CEO, Senior Executive Personalities Impact Performance
Although it is no surprise that CEO personality and the collective personality of senior executives both influence firm performance, what may be surprising is that the two act relatively independently of one another (Colbert et al.).

Virtual Harassment More Damaging Than Face-To-Face
Virtual workplace harassment (i.e., harassment via computer-based communications) can be just as psychologically damaging as face-to-face harassment, but even more so when the person doing the harassing is anonymous or from outside of the organization (Ford).

Is Too Much Creativity a Bad Thing?
All organizations need creative people, but overall levels of creativity might be less beneficial or even detrimental to large or risk-prone organizations (Gong et al.).

Values Predict Self-Starters in Ambiguous Jobs
Individual values predict how proactive employees will be on the job, but only in weak employment situations where ambiguity is high (Grant and Rothbard).

For Extraversion, Moderation is Key
When it comes to the relationship between extraversion and call center performance, individuals with moderate extraversion scores tend to do better than individuals with either low or high scores (Grant).

Shared Leadership Drives Innovation
Shared leadership within teams helps drive innovation (Hoch).

Neurotic People May Also Be Smarter
Both neuroticism and openness to experience are significantly related to certain aspects of higher level cognitive functioning (Murdock et al.).

Workplace Bullying Impacts Mental Health
Workplace bullying not only impacts performance, but also the overall mental health of employees (Nielsen et al.).

Conscientiousness More Important in Low-Level Jobs
Although generally predictive across jobs, conscientiousness may be particularly important for lower level jobs that are highly structured and less cognitively demanding (Shaffer & Postlewaite).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good empirical studies examining coaching and development are always hard to find. But here two from Q1 we thought coaches might enjoy:

• In an effort to determine what influences a client's perception of coaching effectiveness, de Haan et al. examined a number of potential factors using data from over 150 client-coach pairs. They found the perceived quality of the client-coach relationship, or working alliance, was most critical in determining how clients perceive coaching effectiveness.  
• Do you know someone who is dealing with emotional exhaustion or low job satisfaction? If so, research conducted by Hulsheger et al. on the effects of mindfulness might be the answer. In general, employees who are attentive to and accepting of what is going on around them are generally more satisfied with their jobs. The article provides a brief review of and references to additional information concerning mindfulness training.

• Do you need more evidence indicating that delivery method (e.g., paper and pencil v. internet) does not impact results? If so, recent work by Weigold et al. not only supports previous research finding that both methods produce equivalent results, but provides a nice outline of potential problems with studies that have failed to find equivalence.  
• Are you trying to figure out how to increase survey response rates?  Research by Fauth et al. shows you might be up against than you realize. Aside from job satisfaction, several group-level variables, such as work group size, heterogeneity in tenure, and heterogeneity in gender, significantly influence response rates. One positive takeaway is social influences likely matter, so, when trying to increase participation, peer pressure may help.
• On the statistics front, coefficient alpha continues to be the most widely used reliability estimate. For that reason, it is also probably the most widely criticized. Peterson & Kim examined differences between alpha and a popular alternative, composite reliability. Across thousands of estimates, they found that the average estimates from the two approaches differed by only .02. Based on these results, there is no reason to assume that coefficient alpha won’t continue to rain as the king of reliability estimates in I/O Psychology.

Next up, Part 3 of our review will cover a diverse range of articles we thought were worth sharing. And in case you missed it, be sure to check out Part 1 of our review, which summarized articles dealing with a variety of factors that drive performance in organizations. Again, we invite you to provide information relating to any other articles from the first three months of 2013 that we failed to include here.

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

Below is a quick rundown of several articles from Q1 that examined a variety of individual and organizational characteristics that drive performance. This is not an all-inclusive list. So, if you’ve read any new publications or reports from the last three months we failed to include, feel free to write a comment telling us about them.

• In a review of customer service-related variables, Hong et al. provide a nice outline of how leadership impacts a company’s bottom line. First, leadership practices shape an organization’s service climate, which influences employee behaviors. Behaviors impact customer satisfaction, which then drives financial performance. This research provides an excellent demonstration of the Leadership Value Chain at work.
• In reviewing safety-related variables, Hogan & Foster presents research demonstrating how individual employee personality characteristics predict important work outcomes. Using data from multiple samples representing a variety of jobs, organizations, and industries, we show that personality influences safety-related behaviors, which in turn predict major workplace accidents and injuries. In other words, personality doesn’t influence work outcomes by itself, but does so because of its influence in important work-related behaviors.
• We have all heard that self efficacy and performance are correlated with one another, but does one actually cause the other? Research by Sitzmann and Yeo suggests that performance drives self-efficacy, but not necessarily the other way around. Instead, individuals who are confident in their abilities likely do better on many tasks simply because they’ve done well on similar tasks in the past.  
• Is conflict within teams good or bad? According to research by Bradley et al., it all depends on the personality characteristics of your team. When team members are generally high in Emotional Stability or Openness, conflict can drive good performance, but the opposite is true when either characteristic is generally low. So, when dealing with conflict within teams, it helps to know your team members.  
• Abusive supervision continues to be a hot topic these days. In examining the impact of abusive supervision, Shoss et al. found that when employees identify an abusive supervisor with their company, they are more likely to retaliate against the company itself through both counterproductive behaviors and lower job performance.  

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 the Hogan assessments and 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, and peer-reviewed journals.

Be sure to check out this past year’s Hogan-related publications and presentations. Make sure you click through to access our white papers and ebooks!

Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is now vice president of research and innovation at Hogan. In this role, he will work to ensure that we remain on the cutting edge of the personality assessment industry by directing new product research and driving continuous innovation.

"We are excited to welcome Dr. Chamorro-Premuzic to the team," said Dr. Robert Hogan, founder and president of Hogan. "We have hired one of the most talented and productive young personality psychologists working today."

Widely recognized as an international authority on personality and psychometrics, Chamorro-Premuzic has published six books and more than 100 scientific papers. He also received recognition and awards from the American Psychological Association and the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences.

Chamorro-Premuzic frequently appears in the media to offer psychological expertise on a wide range of topics. He has an extensive broadcasting career, including more than 200 media appearances, including more than 70 television appearances for networks such as the BBC, CNN and Sky News. He is also a regular keynote speaker for the Institute of Economic Affairs and an Associate to Harvard's Entrepreneurial Finance Lab.

In addition to his new role, Chamorro-Premuzic is currently Professor of Business Psychology at University College London (UCL), where he researches, teaches and consults on a variety of issues concerning talent management and the psychology of human capital. He also served as visiting professor at New York University and the London School of Economics.

"I am excited about joining the Hogan team," said Chamorro-Premuzic. "Together, we will continue Hogan's legacy of setting the highest standards in personality assessment around the world."

I have been interested in the problem of self-deception (doing things for reasons that we don’t properly understand or acknowledge) my entire adult life. Writers as diverse as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and JP Sartre thought self-deception was the primary source of human misery. They also argued that people should try to overcome their self-deception for moral reasons – self-deception is the cause of most bad behavior. In everyday life, self-deception most often appears as hypocrisy.

I have also been interested in evolutionary theory my entire adult life, but my views on evolutionary theory tend to depart from the conventional wisdom as set forth by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides. A central assumption of their view is that the mind is modular, that different components of the cognitive system evolved to solve different problems and that the degree to which these different mental modules communicate is an open question, and in many cases they may not.

Robert Kurzban recently published a book, Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite, applying this mainstream evolutionary thinking to the problem of self-deception. Elliott Spitzer, the disgraced former Governor of New York, provides a good example of the problem. Spitzer notoriously campaigned publicly against prostitution while allegedly privately employing call girls with enthusiasm. The mainstream view of evolutionary psychology (Kurzban) explains Spitzer’s hypocrisy by arguing that his moralistic module didn’t communicate with his lust module. I think there are two problems with this argument.

First, the modular theory of the mind bears an eerie resemblance to 19th century phrenology. But more importantly, it seems wrong-headed. Karl Lashley (1890-1958) proposed what he called the law of mass action, based on a great deal of careful research on the actual workings of rats’ brains. The law of mass action maintains that the brain operates as an organized whole; specific thoughts are distributed across the brain and somehow become organized to generate appropriate solutions or behavioral responses. Lashley is generally credited with showing that the brain is much more complex than earlier researchers realized. But more importantly, it seems intuitively obvious that inputs from the various sensory systems feed into some kind of central processing unit which organizes the data, and generates appropriate responses. Otherwise, how could an organism coordinate thought and action and survive?

Second, the propensity to reflect on one’s actions and to compare them with internalized norms is an individual differences variable. People with low scores on HPI Adjustment and high scores on HPI Prudence are prone to intensive self-examination and self-criticism. People with high scores on HPI Adjustment and low scores on HPI Prudence are not prone to self-examination. Spitzer fits the second pattern to perfection.

But evolutionary theory provides a straightforward alternative account. In every social living species, cheaters or free-riders inevitably emerge. Free-riders participate in the benefits of social living – cooperation, group support, shared food – but act selfishly and contribute nothing to the welfare of the larger social group. Parenthetically, I think politicians are the free riders of democratic society. Social interaction is about impression management. Hypocrisy is the free-rider’s solution to the problem of how to endorse altruistic values while behaving selfishly. And it is worth noting that Elliott Spitzer was a career politician.