Much of what directs organisational behaviour lies below the surface. Individuals must reconcile organisational goals with their personal goals—often subconsciously. What drives the secret life of organisations? Evolutionary theory and personality psychology.

On episode 152 of The Science of Personality, Robert Hogan, PhD, founder and president of Hogan Assessments, discusses his newest book, Personality and the Secret Life of Organizations. The book represents the broadening of Dr. Hogan’s ideas on personality psychology to the highest level: the organisation.

According to Dr. Hogan, “Leadership is the most important force in human affairs. Personality is the key to understanding leadership. That makes personality the most important topic in human affairs, full stop.”

The Origin of The Secret Life of Organisations

Dr. Hogan moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1982 to start a PhD program in industrial-organisational psychology (IO psychology) with a focus on personality. He found that traditional IO psychology textbooks were only a collection of topics without an intellectual theme. He wrote Personality and the Fate of Organizations¹ as an antidote for that shortcoming.

His new book, Personality and the Secret Life of Organizations,² encompasses the Hogan point of view on leadership. It begins with chimpanzee politics (more on this soon), then moves through individual personality, teams, and organisational theory. “Personality is an integral part of all those discussions, even when it’s not recognised as such,” Dr. Hogan said.

In the 1960s, mainstream academic textbooks assumed that personality and leadership were unimportant or even nonexistent. “I spent a good bit of my career early on trying to demonstrate that personality is real and consequential, leadership is real and consequential, and personality is associated with leadership,” said Dr. Hogan. Personality and the Secret Life of Organizations places organisational theory properly in the context of human prehistory, the rise of organisations, and political leadership, among other key concepts.

Chimpanzee Politics and Organizational Theory

To understand organisations, one must first understand human nature. Dr. Hogan uses chimpanzee politics to explain organisational behaviour, drawing on evolutionary theory and animal behaviour from Chimpanzee Politics³ to frame organisational theory. Chimpanzees are group-living animals, that is, they depend on their groups for individual survival and status.

Among chimpanzee males, there’s a clear hierarchy: an alpha male, subordinate males, and outcast males. The alpha male not only is the biggest and strongest but also has the most support of the group. Competition for the alpha role and its privileges is constant. “There’s a period of real chaos as the new alpha has to establish his right to rule,” said Dr. Hogan. “This is just like Washington, DC.”

Getting Along vs. Getting Ahead

“The principal dynamic in every organisation is the individual search for power,” Dr. Hogan explained. However, it’s not socially acceptable to directly claim to have ambitious goals. In every organisation (and chimpanzee troop), individuals are manoeuvring for power and status. These multiple individual agendas create competition within the organisation. Dr. Hogan expressed the inherent tension between the individual and the organisation this way: “What’s good for you may or may not be good for your organisation. What’s good for your organisation is always good for you.”

People need groups for survival and for status. According to Dr. Hogan, the major task of leadership is to try to get individuals to align their personal agendas with the interests of the group. In other words, each of us has conflicting drives to cooperate with others in a group for survival (getting along) but also compete with others for status (getting ahead). The complexities of reconciling one’s need to be a part of the group with one’s self-promoting impulses inform the secret life of organisations. This tension produces two very different kinds of leaders: Dr. Hogan distinguishes emergent leaders, who win the competition for status, from effective leaders, who actually build teams that succeed.

Six Universal Themes Present in Organisations

That individual-versus-organisation tension doesn’t stay contained at the individual level—it shapes the organisation as a whole. Before describing the recurring patterns that result, Dr. Hogan traces why organisational theory was so slow to take personality seriously in the first place. According to Dr. Hogan, 19th- and 20th-century American psychology was dominated by behaviourism, which maintained that personality was largely irrelevant to explaining behaviour. The principal claim of behaviourism is that people behave according to situational reinforcement—not, notably, because of personality characteristics. Psychologist Walter Mischel even held that there was no such thing as personality.⁴

In studying organisational theory, Dr. Hogan has observed six generalisations, or themes, that together shape organisational behaviour.

• Organisations as pyramid schemes – From nonprofit organisations to religious institutions to governments to Hogan Assessments itself, the earnings of the people at the top depend on the work of others.
• Who shall rule? – The principal dynamic of organisations is the search for power. Answering the question of who shall rule is the fundamental question in human affairs.
• The origin of rules – Rules are often added to organisations but rarely subtracted. Thus, over time, rules inhibit productivity to the point of organisational dysfunction.
• Inevitable factions – Factions always arise under leadership. As in chimpanzee politics, leaders try to keep factions under control to retain their power, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.
• Free riders as inevitable – Free riders always emerge. Free riders take advantage of the benefits of belonging to an organisation and give nothing back, which undermines organisational sustainability.
• The garbage-can model – Policies and procedures always accumulate. The policies that managers put into place stay when the managers themselves go. Much like rules, policies and procedures stay in place to fix problems that may not even exist anymore.

Dr. Hogan points out that literature on organisational theory typically ignores organisational effectiveness. “Clearly some organisations are better run than others,” he said, calling the omission a huge gap in intellectual inquiry. Effective leaders are those who build and maintain a team that performs well. In short, effective leaders build and maintain effective organisations.

Effective Leader Characteristics

Personality and the Secret Life of Organizations is in conversation with the writing of Sigmund Freud on corrupt politicians, particularly Totem and Taboo.⁵ Such corrupt leaders highlight the importance of the distinction between emergent and effective leadership, introduced earlier. As Dr. Hogan said, “Emergent leaders are the ones who rise fast and get a lot of attention. Effective leaders are the ones who actually make the organisation better.” The connection to Freud is that individual psychology, which is rooted in evolutionary history, plays a role in shaping the institutions, cultures, and societies of today.

So, what makes an effective leader? Dr. Hogan identified five characteristics:

• Humility – willingness to listen and learn from others
• Rationality – valuing expertise and taking advice
• Innovation – drive to constantly improve
• Minimising hierarchy – access to talent across organisational levels
• Ambition – wanting to win

Dr. Hogan mentioned Ulysses S. Grant as humble, Napoleon Bonaparte as able to minimise hierarchy, and Ronald Reagan as ambitious. He quoted Reagan’s famous quip about the US Cold War strategy: “We win, they lose.” This sentiment may lie at the heart of organisations too.

Listen to this conversation in full on episode 152 of The Science of Personality.

References

1. Hogan, R. (2007). Personality and the Fate of Organizations. Hogan Press.
2. Hogan, R. (2026). Personality and the Secret Life of Organizations. Hogan Press.
3. De Waal, F. B. M. (1998). Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes (Rev. ed.). Johns Hopkins University Press.
4. Mischel, W. (1968). Personality and Assessment. Wiley.
5. Freud, S. (1950). Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (J. Strachey, Trans.). W. W. Norton & Company.

*This article originally appeared on Hogan Assessments.