Leadership Lessons From Muhammad Ali
Professional sports often illustrate important psychological and life principles, even for the world of business. Traditionally, discussions on leadership tend to focus on team sports, but occasionally individual athletes emerge who can teach us a great deal about leadership, too. Here are some lessons from the extraordinary Muhammad Ali: 1) Morality is antisocial:Â True leadership […]
The Economy of Human Nature
Adam Smith, author of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (aka The Wealth of Nations), is considered the father of modern economics. Since its publication in 1776, The Wealth of Nations has influenced virtually all modern economists and, to some extent, much of western philosophy. Smith argued that unregulated competition engenders unbridled, self-interested behavior […]
The HPI Turns 3…Million!
Hogan’s status as a global innovator in personality assessment is nothing new. In 1998, after administering the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) in more traditional formats for years, we were the first test publisher to develop a web-based assessment platform. After we fully integrated the system to score HPI results for personnel selection and employee development in 2001, […]
Chats From China: Cross Cultural Questions
China is home to over half a million foreigners, many of whom are here for business. Multinational corporations doing business in China, as well as Chinese companies who are going global, all face questions regarding talent within a multicultural setting. As a Hogan representative in China, I frequently field questions about personality in a multicultural […]
Losing sight of the individual in group development programs
I often come across articles focused on development efforts for women and millennials. These two demographics – gender and age – are treated as key considerations in employee development program design. The thought seems to be that if organizations could only figure out how to develop women and young professionals, they could solve myriad talent […]
Star performers vs. Effective Team Performance
Written by Dr. Robert Hogan and Dr. Kimberly Nei In a fascinating and counter-intuitive paper, two Harvard economists (Housman and Minor) suggest that it makes better financial sense not to hire toxic workers than to hire star performers. Toxic workers engage in theft, property damage, sexual harassment, and workplace violence and destroy the culture of the workplace. […]
The Engaging Leader: How do you become one?
Written by guest blogger Nick Starritt Managing Director of Sirota, Europe, Middle East, Africa Isn’t it curious how peoples’ engagement varies inside an organisation? Why do some teams become evidently more committed and productive than others? The graph below shows the distribution of team engagement (how people feel, think and act towards the company), across 500 […]
What you think makes a good leader probably doesn’t
What does it take to be a good leader? One reason that’s such a perennial question is because it’s so hard to answer. Many of our opinions about leadership are based on subjective experiences rather than the full breadth of psychological research in the field. We may think we know what qualities we value in those who […]
How different are your online and offline personalities?
Our habits define us. But how true is this for our digital habits? Are we the same online as offline? In the early days of the internet, it was probably safe to assume that our online behaviours did not reveal much about our real-world personas. This notion was popularised by the “on the internet, nobody […]
The Personality Traits of Engaging and Disengaging Leaders
Most people think of leadership as a vocation, but it’s really a psychological process—namely, the process of influencing others to put aside their self-serving agendas and cooperate for the common good of a group. Companies are just bigger, more organized groups than those groups where our earliest ancestors first developed the psychological patterns we still live with […]
