Personality and the Fate of Organizations by Robert Hogan, Ph.D.
According to Robert Hogan, co-founder and President of the hugely influential Hogan Assessment Systems, the success or failure of an organization of any size, depends crucially on the personalities of the folks in charge. In this brief volume, Hogan surveys a colorful history of personality research, including the ascension of the Five Factor Model, unceremoniously throws the MBTI and EQ assessments under the bus, explains how most leadership selection processes fall short (interviews capture only social skills while missing other essential aspects of good leadership) and gives compelling evidence of personality driving team, and thus, company performance. Hogan is super-practical in his concerns: Leaders must be perceived as having integrity, decisiveness, competence, vision, persistence, and humility. Whether they actually have these characteristics is not the issue, as long as they act as if they do in front of others. Hogan can be rigid in describing good/bad leaders and clumsily falls into stereotyping. For example, he exhibits an outdated bias for extroverted leaders over introverted (Ruth Bader Ginsburg anyone?) And in describing those vulnerable to the Imaginative derailer (from Hogan HDS) suggests we keep a lookout for people with “purple hair and exotic tattoos”. Hmm.
HIGHLIGHT(S): The pragmatic Hogan judges a leader’s effectiveness in terms of his/her ability to build and maintain a group that performs well over time as compared to the group’s competition. This results-based assessment departs from conventional views of effectiveness that focus on identifying which person in a group seems to exert the most influence or gets the best leadership ratings from others.
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