Alexander Haslam, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of Queensland, recently coauthored a paper about the axioms of zombie leadership.¹ The research offers some insight to reduce the influence of zombie leadership’s myths.

What Is Zombie Leadership?

The concept of zombie leadership was inspired by Zombie Economics by John Quiggin.² Quiggin observed that the field of economics is full of ideas that have been refuted academically but still influence the decision-making of policymakers and other economists. Disproven ideas also persist in leadership practices. To describe the philosophy of zombie leadership, Haslam and his coauthors compiled eight core axioms, expressed as absolute statements that research has debunked:

1. Leadership is all about leaders.
2. There are specific qualities that all great leaders “have.”
3. There are specific things that all great leaders do.
4. We all know a great leader when we see one.
5. All leadership is the same.
6. Leadership is a special skill limited to special people.
7. Leadership is always good, and it is always good for everyone.
8. People can’t cope without leaders.

According to Haslam, the golden axiom of zombie leadership is that leadership is all about leaders. “We’re fixated on leaders and their character, but leadership as a process is about a relationship between leaders and the groups they lead. Fundamentally, it’s proved by the followership of others,” Haslam said.

As the axioms demonstrate, the characteristics of successful leaders are not one-size-fits-all. Successful leaders vary in skills and experience. Haslam pointed out that individuals shape their context and are shaped by it. This dynamic, he says, gets lost when personality is treated as fixed and predictive. Leadership itself depends on others choosing to follow, not on a leader’s individual traits.

Zombie Leadership vs. Effective Leadership

So, what keeps zombie leadership alive? It’s a systemic issue perpetuated in the leadership-industrial complex, popular media, and society at large. Leadership development, for instance, is an $80 billion global industry that often makes assumptions about leadership qualities and behaviours.

To provide an example from the media, Haslam pointed to team sports commentary to show how the zombie model of leadership informs our views of coaches and teams. After a significant victory or outstanding performance, the press typically wants to lionize the coach for the team’s achievement. “People who are good at leadership recoil from that,” Haslam observed. Instead, they direct recognition to the team’s effort.

How does the zombie-type coach respond? “Yes, it was me. I’m actually rather good, aren’t I? Thank you very much,” Haslam quipped. He called out self-aggrandisement at the expense of the team as a red flag.

When people gain power, their influence can become destructive. In fact, nearly everyone who has ever had a boss knows the chaos and unhappiness that can ensue when a leader uses power to prioritise personal interests above those of the group. People don’t want to follow leaders like that.

Although organisations continue to select leaders who seem charismatic or leaderlike, effective leadership is the ability to build and maintain a team that performs well relative to its competition. Leadership depends upon the team’s willingness to follow; the act of leading necessitates others who choose to follow. Haslam said the assumption that leadership resides in the individual is unrealistic. “You need that group process for leadership to manifest itself,” he explained.

The Usness of Leadership

Haslam described leadership as the process of influencing group members to contribute to the group’s goals. Under this definition of leadership, widely held in similar forms throughout academic literature, a leader’s power stems from the actions of others, not from their own achievements. When successful, this process of influence often takes the form of shared decision-making, responsibility, and relationships—far from dictatorial orders.

When people gain power by accomplishing work through others, the leaders are more effective and their followers more successful. “Leaders are people who create, advance, represent, and embed a sense of us. Leadership is all about usness,” Haslam said.

Hogan research supports Haslam’s ideas about leaders, teams, and usness. Our global data show that a huge gap exists between the characteristics people want in their leaders and the leaders that organisations promote. This underscores how zombie leadership skews organisations toward the wrong leaders, as opposed to leaders that teams actually want to follow. According to Haslam, “We want people who take care of us, inspire us, motivate us, make us feel good about what we’re doing, and help us to be better.”

Individuals in power may resist this idea because it requires them to change. They would rather hold on to zombie leadership because it serves their self-interest. Haslam told a story about colleagues who spent years researching effective leadership in a certain organisation. When they presented their findings and recommendations to the C-suite, the CEO pushed their report aside and proceeded to lecture them on what leadership was. (Spoiler: It was zombie leadership.)

How to Challenge the Zombie Leadership Narrative

Zombie leadership continues to affect organisations around the globe, wherever people still believe leadership is about leaders. Academic research on leadership has remained disconnected from real-world practice. Rather than focusing on leaders as individuals, leadership research should place leaders in the context of team dynamics, assessing leadership according to team performance. Likewise, leadership development programs should focus on how to build and maintain high-performing teams. “What you want leadership development to do is to direct people towards the people that they’re trying to lead,” Haslam said.

Understand Leadership Effectiveness

Haslam criticised top organisational leaders who single-mindedly pursue influence, money, and status: “I don’t think those people are doing leadership. They’re not interested in influencing or shaping the group.”

Organisations must stop selecting leaders based on confidence and charisma. They must evaluate leaders based on the performance of their team. A leader whose team has high morale and engagement, understands and feels good about the purpose of its work, and produces results—this leader leads their team well.

Celebrate Effective Leadership

Leadership doesn’t only take place in corporations; it happens everywhere that people share a common goal. To counteract zombie leadership, we need to broaden our view of who can be an effective leader. We need to celebrate leaders who run organisations that aren’t based in boardrooms.

From families to clubs to classrooms, effective leaders make teamwork happen. Haslam suggested that a rule of thumb for identifying a good leader is someone who treats their team members with the respect and consideration they would show family members: “Fundamentally, good leadership is a democratic process in that it’s shared and distributed and we all have a role to play. We should start to run the world the way we want to run our families. If your family is functional, you’re not doing zombie leadership.”

Challenge Assumptions

Using the axioms of zombie leadership, let’s evaluate leadership effectiveness in the groups to which we belong. Question the assumptions that inform who leads and how they lead. “The organisations we’re members of are the ones that we can change,” Haslam said. “We desperately need to challenge this narrative because it’s hugely destructive.”

When others see the benefits of doing things differently, they’ll begin to support effective leadership practices. They will challenge the leadership models of more groups. Even if those who adhere to leadership myths push back, ask the difficult questions anyway.

Stay Hopeful

Better leadership—even if it’s a ten percent, five percent, or one percent improvement—will make a better world. Imagine the cascade of positive change if more leaders worked to serve their teams rather than themselves. These are not easy myths to bury, but as Haslam said, “It’s not going to happen without our effort.”

This article was adapted from episode 155 of The Science of Personality.

References

1. Haslam, S. A., Alvesson, M., & Reicher, S. D. (2024). Zombie Leadership: Dead Ideas That Still Walk Among Us. The Leadership Quarterly, 35(3). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2023.101770
2. Quiggin, J. (2012). Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

*This article originally appeared on Hogan Assessments.

The post Is Zombie Leadership Running Your Org? appeared first on Peter Berry Consultancy.

Choosing the right assessment for selecting or developing employees can make or break the success of a talent initiative. Why bother using assessments that don’t predict performance, or that fail to resonate with your business leaders? When deciding on the right assessment for your valuable talent, pay attention to the scientific rigor with which the instruments have been tested.

Any good tool should have concrete data demonstrating its validity and reliability. Validity and reliability can tell you two general things: 1) that the assessment is measuring what you want it to, and 2) that it will reliably assess the same thing each time ensuring that the results you get aren’t a one-off.

An easy way to think about this concept is with a bullseye metaphor: The very center of the bullseye is exactly what you want to assess.

What is Validity?

Validity refers to the accuracy of the assessment. In essence, does it measure what it is supposed to measure? While there are several types of validity to pay attention to, the most important for our purposes is predictive validity.

Predictive validity tells us how accurate a tool is at predicting a certain outcome. In the case of personality assessments, a good tool will be able to predict how well someone will perform their job. Validity is typically measured with a coefficient between 0 and 11 (called the Pearson correlation coefficient). The closer to one, the more accurate the predictive power of the test. The predictive validity of the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) is .29 for predicting performance across job families. However, when the HPI is combined with the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) and Motives, Values, and Preferences Inventory (MVPI), that number jumps to .54. While this may not seem very high, a good comparison is to look at the validity for something completely unrelated.

For example, the predictive validity of ibuprofen for pain reduction is only .14. For another, more closely-related example, the correlation between structured job interviews and job performance is .18. There are many ways of measuring validity, some more useful than others. Any assessment provider worth their salt should be able to provide you with evidence of validity. If they don’t, it’s worth considering why not.

What is Reliability?

Reliability, on the other hand, refers to the consistency of the test. The reliability of an assessment can be evaluated in two broad ways: 1) internal consistency, and 2) test-retest reliability.

Test-retest reliability is a measure of consistency of responses over time. In other words, are people responding to questions the same way each time they take the test? Inconsistent responses can indicate that assessments results are not actually measuring personality, which should be relatively stable over time. Test-retest reliability uses a correlation of scores (again, using the Pearson coefficient) from a first assessment and a second assessment sometime later.

For Hogan, the short-term test-retest reliability is .81 for the HPI, .70 for the HDS, and .79 for the MVPI. Internal consistency relates to the questions that are used in each assessment. Test takers will notice that many questions appear to measure the same thing. This is on purpose. Asking a question in a few different ways helps us to ensure that we are getting an accurate measurement of the concept. Like validity, reliability scores are also measured between 0 and 1 (this time with a coefficient called Cronbach’s alpha). The closer to 1, the higher the reliability. The average internal consistency for the HPI scales is .76, .71 for the HDS, and .76 for the MVPI. 1Absolute value. Scores between -1 and 0 indicate a negative correlation.

The important thing to note is that there is no one right way to measure reliability or validity. In fact, assessment publishers should constantly be monitoring their products to ensure they maintain the accuracy that they claim. Hogan Assessments are far above industry standards with continual evaluation of our own assessments. We are partial though, and we encourage you to seek out this information with any assessment system you choose. Hogan Assessments have appeared in over 400 peer-reviewed publications to ensure that our tests are hitting the bullseye.

The post A Quick and Dirty Guide to Validity & Reliability appeared first on Peter Berry Consultancy.

Personality is the driving force behind human behaviour. At PBC, we eat, sleep, and breathe personality psychology. We study the science of personality, we’ve pioneered the use of personality tests to improve workplace performance, and our tests evaluate all aspects of personality: the bright side, the dark side, and the inside. But we also understand that not everyone knows personality like we do, and that’s why we put together this guide to help you develop your expertise.

What is personality?

While there are many definitions of personality, our perspective on the subject derives from socioanalytic theory, which integrates interpersonal theory with evolutionary psychology.

Socioanalytic theory assumes that human nature is characteristically social. People always live in groups, which always have a hierarchy with a well-defined structure of power and a leader. People need to have a system of meaning, such as religion, philosophy, or science, that helps them make sense of the world. As a consequence of these three things, people will always have three main motives: getting along with others (i.e., cooperation), getting ahead of others (i.e., competition), and finding meaning. Personality is what determines how people work toward those goals and the extent to which they achieve them.

More specifically, three components of personality shape our interactions: identity, reputation, and social skill. Identity is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves—it’s the person you think you are. While there might be some takeaways in how we perceive ourselves, we are usually wrong. We often have an inflated idea of our own talent, or we might be unnecessarily hard on ourselves.

Reputation, on the other hand, is what everyone else thinks of us, and it’s based on our overt behaviours and social skills. Your reputation is the person other people think you are. Your success in the workplace is dependent on your reputation, and this is the part of personality that the best personality tests are based on.

Does personality change over time?

If changes to someone’s personality do occur, they happen very slowly. Individual behaviour can change on a day-to-day basis, but personality refers to behavioural patterns that we see consistently over time. It’s helpful to think about the following analogy about the weather to describe personality changes. While we can’t predict daily weather very accurately, we have an idea of what’s likely to happen. It’s much easier to predict regional and seasonal weather patterns. Like the daily weather, behaviour can change moment to moment and context to context. But personality is more like the regional and seasonal weather, where it takes time to see change.

Think about development coaching. You have a reputation for behaving a certain way, but through coaching, those behaviours can change. It’s just going to take time before others notice, and those changes aren’t going to deviate much from your natural tendencies. Personality is quite stable; that is, people do not change very much once they reach a certain age.

Scores from personality tests also can be quite stable when the assessment is well constructed. A person retaking a quality personality test will get very similar results most of the time, while retaking a poorly made personality test can have dramatically different results. But just like scores on many other types of tests, including cognitive ability tests and certain medical tests (e.g., blood pressure), personality assessment scores can fluctuate, even over short intervals. At Hogan, we’ve found that fluctuating scores on reassessments typically fall within two points of the original assessment score. This degree of variation does not usually affect the interpretation of the overall personality profile. In fact, when these changes do occur, they tend to be a result of a change in methodology and not reflective of a change in the individual.

How are personality tests made?

We spend a great deal of time thinking about the difference between identity and reputation when we build our personality assessments. Identity, or how we think about ourselves, is frequently changing and often self-serving, and that makes it a poor basis for building personality assessments. Reputation, or how others think about us, is often more stable and a more useful way to build personality assessments that predict job performance. The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour. Because reputation reflects past behaviour, reputation is the best predictor of future behaviour.

We validate our assessments by having people take those assessments. Then we ask other people who know them, such as peers, direct reports, and managers, to describe what they’re like. The assessment data and observer ratings—along with job performance review data, objective performance data, and 360-degree data—are stored in a database with personality data from several million people. Once someone has taken our assessments, we can use the information from our database to predict whether the person will be able to do a job, how they will behave on the job, and even whether they will like the job.

How do personality tests predict job performance?

Personality assessments should measure personality from the perspective of reputation, which is how others are likely to describe or experience us.

Reputation is a collection of past and present behaviours described by others, and we know it to be the best predictor of future job performance. We have found that personality helps us to describe the characteristics and behaviours that are required for or important to job performance—things like resiliency and strategic self-awareness and collaboration.

Hogan’s personality tests are based on decades of research on personality psychology and measurement, and they have been validated against external criteria, including job performance and peer ratings. This allows us to describe the reputation that a job candidate likely has in the workplace.

We also compare the way a job candidate scores to thousands of other people to determine how that person will likely behave at work. Using custom research involving job analysis, we can also create personality profiles to determine how well candidates will fit into a particular job role or organisational culture.

Are personality tests accurate? What is validity?

In the case of personality assessments, a good tool can predict how well someone will perform their job. Not all personality assessments are accurate. Because the assessment industry is largely unregulated, many personality assessments on the market do not measure what they claim.

There are two main questions that determine whether an assessment can deliver accurate results. Does it measure what it’s designed to measure? And does it measure it consistently? In short, accuracy requires evidence of validity and reliability. There are many types of validity. Criterion validity is the best type of validity to use for personality tests. Criterion validity refers to the accuracy of predicting a desired outcome. So in the case of personality tests, the outcome is predicting performance in specific jobs. Reliability refers to the consistency of the measurement.

One way that you can evaluate this consistency is with test-retest reliability. Test-retest reliability refers to consistency of measurement across multiple test administrations. For example, using a ruler to measure height will produce the same measurement every time. That’s because a ruler is a reliable measure of height. We want our personality assessments to function in the same way.

We take pride in the validity and reliability of our assessments; they have a proven track record of predicting job performance.

Do personality tests discriminate or violate privacy?

We believe that personality assessments should be valid and fair to every job candidate and we have worked hard over the past three decades to democratise access to employment. Our validation research meets the highest professional standards, which means our assessments provide equal opportunity based on occupational qualifications and have no adverse impact on the candidate.

Broad research on personality has been conducted around the globe. When we look at that research, it shows that people are quite consistent. There aren’t really meaningful differences—based on things like age, gender, or ethnicity—in how individuals score on well-validated and accurate assessments.

The Hogan assessments are used to predict and measure workplace-related outcomes. They’re not diagnostic or clinical tools, which means we don’t use them to identify or diagnose any sort of clinical disorders. Because of that, and because they are well-constructed and valid instruments, they comply with all industry and professional regulations and don’t violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Hogan’s researchers spend a lot of time and effort ensuring that our assessments are predictive of the workplace outcomes we care about, applicable to a broad audience, and non-invasive.

Can people fake personality tests?

Despite the name, personality tests are not actually tests but rather an assessment of an individual’s personality. That means that there are no right or wrong answers, so faking is extremely difficult. When you answer a personality question, it’s actually a consideration of job fit. Do you fit with that job?

Another thing to consider is what experimental studies on faking tell us. When people are instructed to fake an assessment for a particular job deliberately, they get different scores than they would have gotten by answering honestly. But in the real world, when someone is actually trying to apply for a particular position, faking has no impact whatsoever on the person’s overall scores. That is, the person won’t get better job-fit scores.

In fact, in studies we’ve done here at Hogan, we’ve found that people who try to fake on personality assessments often get worse job-fit scores than they would have gotten if they had just applied for the job and taken the assessment in a more natural way.

In sum, the big picture on faking is that it’s not really an issue for personality assessments.

How can businesses use personality tests?

Talent acquisition and talent development are two primary applications for personality tests in the workplace.

Organisations can use personality tests to determine if candidates have the key personality characteristics to be successful in a job and if they fit the company culture. Assessments can also be used to uncover performance risks, improve interview techniques, and compare candidates side by side.

In industries that have a high risk of injuries and accidents, such as construction or oil and gas, safety assessments can be used for preselection. This allows companies to hire the right people to develop a culture of occupational safety. For talent development, personality assessments can be used to identify employees’ strengths and weaknesses. Personality tests can encourage employees to take proactive steps to improve performance and help employees avoid career derailment.

What are the benefits of using a personality test?

Personality tests have many benefits for employment decisions, including identifying a match with core competencies and reducing bias in hiring.

First of all, the core competencies for most jobs are linked to personality characteristics, and a well-constructed assessment can measure those. This can be beneficial for hiring decisions as well as performance management. The benefits of hiring the right candidates and promoting the right employees can help an organisation to improve its business outcomes—for example, by increasing the bottom line and reducing turnover.

Second, while there are many valid ways organisations can identify and develop talent, personality assessments offer the unique benefit of reducing the impact of bias on personnel decisions. Personality assessments are less discriminatory than classic evaluation methods, such as interviews and cognitive assessments. By reducing the impact of bias on employment decisions, personality assessments can also promote increased diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace.

How can you assess a personality assessment?

You don’t have to go too deep into the science to assess a personality test. There are three things to consider: job relatedness, reliability, and validity.

Job relatedness is an important scientific and legal standard that helps determine whether an assessment measures what is important for success on the job. Job relatedness is established through the process of job analysis. The assessment provider should be able to explain how the job analysis process works and how the process supports the use of the provider’s assessments for specific purposes.

The second factor to consider is reliability, which refers to the consistency of the assessment. Does the assessment reliably measure the same thing each time? This is what ensures that the results you get from the assessment aren’t a one-off. If the assessment is supposed to measure enduring characteristics, such as extroversion, it should be able to measure the same level of those characteristics each time. Ask the assessment provider to provide evidence of the assessment’s reliability.

The third factor to consider is validity, which refers to the accuracy of the personality test. Does the test measure what it’s supposed to measure? A valid assessment is one that helps you make accurate predictions. Just like with reliability, you should ask the assessment provider for documented scientific evidence that the assessment will help you make the predictions you need to make.

Finally, while making your evaluation, remember that decisions made using assessment results affect people’s lives for better or worse. Peter Berry Consultancy is the Authorised Distributor for Hogan Assessments in Australia. Click here for certification workshop dates.

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A team under strain

Picture this: a team of 9 in the operations arm of a mid-sized financial services firm. A restructuring removed a layer of management and two colleagues, and the remaining team shared their work. A new system was due within six months to replace the one everyone was used to, and the targets stayed exactly where they were. Senior leaders called it a chance to do things differently. The team, being committed, responded the way dedicated teams do with longer hours, more meetings, more effort.

For a while, performance was stable. Then small cracks started to appear. In the corridor and on private chat, the same line kept surfacing: “we can’t keep this up.” Two people, each confident they knew what mattered most, spent a fortnight on overlapping work. When the new system did not function optimally, people went back to their old spreadsheets rather than raise it in a team meeting where concerns were now rarely aired at all. Decisions that once took a conversation took three meetings. People became protective of their workloads and frustrated with colleagues they saw as not pulling their weight, and the high performers carried an increasing share of the workload while others withdrew. Six months later, two of the strongest people had resigned, engagement had fallen, and deadlines were being missed, despite everyone working harder than ever.

It would be easy to blame the restructure, the new system or a few individuals who could not hold the line. None of these fully explain the dynamics that led to this final result. What had failed was the team’s capacity to absorb sustained pressure and adapt, and more effort did not restore it. In an environment where change had become the norm, fragility had replaced adaptability.

Why teams, and what “effective” means

All organisations experience periods of instability. This could be driven by broader forces like politics and the economy, or more localised, where perhaps there is a change in leadership or restructuring occurs. Yet regardless of the nature of these disruptions, organisations are expected to navigate uncertainty while continuing to deliver results. They lean heavily on teams to do it, for good reason. A team that works well is sharper than any one person in it, with shared perspectives in decision-making to avoid blind spots and benefit from complementary expertise.

That is a conditional claim, though. Hackman suggests that whether a team beats its members working alone depends far more on how it is set up and led than merely having the label of team.¹ So, it helps to be precise here: by a team we mean two or more people who interact, share goals and depend on one another’s work to achieve them.²

What makes such a team effective? Hackman’s answer has three parts: the people who receive the work rate that work as good, the team becomes more capable of working together over time, and its members leave better for the experience than they were before. The third part deserves attention. How many teams have you belonged to that left you energised rather than drained? Most measures of team performance stop at the first part: financial results, delivery volume, quality, etc. The second and third are where resilience often resides. A team that cannot adapt to setbacks risks poorer decisions, weaker collaboration and less innovation over time, while its members become more stressed, disengaged and exposed to burnout.

What team resilience is

Researchers define team resilience as “a team’s capacity to bounce back from adversity-induced process loss”.³ In simple terms, process loss is where team coordination and effort get disrupted due to an event that creates adversity and induces stress. Adversity need not be a global shock like a pandemic; it can be a key member or leader leaving, a regulatory change, or an operational breakdown. Team resilience in these moments has been linked to stronger team and project performance, greater team creativity and, for senior leadership teams, improved organisational outcomes such as financial performance or the organisation’s ability to adapt to new environmental requirements.⁴

At this stage, it is important to highlight two points related to the nature of team resilience. First, team resilience is not individual results averaged out across the team. A team of resilient individuals is not automatically a resilient team.⁵

Second, the research points to four collective resources a team draws on when adversity hits. In the academic literature, these four appear as team potency (collective belief they can achieve difficult things), teams’ mental models of teamwork (shared understanding of ways of working), team capacity to improvise (adapting and adjusting appropriately), and team psychological safety (the safety to speak up and take risks). Kirkman and Stoverink provide more accessible terms where needed calling the four resources team confidence, teamwork roadmaps, capacity to improvise and psychological safety.⁶ A caution is warranted here as research on team resilience is growing rather than settled. Treat what follows as a well-grounded way of thinking based on current evidence, not a settled framework.

Where the Four Horsemen come from

A team that cannot adapt through change and grow is fragile because it responds in a rigid way to what is thrown at it. Across the literature and our consulting work, we see fragility appear in four recognisable ways, where each team resource starts to erode. We call them the Four Horsemen of Team Fragility: Doubt, Drift, Defaulting and Distrust. To be clear, the four resources come from research on team resilience as noted earlier. The Four Ds are our PBC framework for describing what it can look like when those resources start to erode. They are practical indicators that help to identify trouble early, not a validated diagnostic measure.

Identifying the signs of Team Fragility

Each D is something you can observe, and each helps identify a possible shortfall in one of the four resources.

1. Team Confidence vs Doubt: “We can’t do this”

Team potency, or team confidence, is the shared belief that the group can succeed through whatever comes its way. It is a collective belief, not the sum of individual self-belief, and it matters most where people depend on each other.⁷When confidence erodes, teams can fall into Doubt, where problems feel overwhelming, initiative declines, and the team loses belief in its ability to succeed. Something to try: Confidence tends to follow evidence. Break the pressure into pieces of work the team can win, then celebrate what it has already achieved. Leaders who point only at the gap to their target usually deepen Doubt.

2. Shared Ways of Working vs Drift: everyone pulling their own way

A shared mental model of teamwork refers to a common understanding of who does what, who needs what from whom, and how decisions get made. Teams with shared models coordinate and perform better.⁸ A model built for old conditions can become no longer fit for purpose when circumstances change and the team does not revisit it. Teams can begin to Drift when this shared understanding weakens, leading to different priorities, mixed messages and poor coordination. Something to try: Redraw the roadmap out loud and together whenever conditions shift. You can also look to answer three questions together: what matters most now, who owns what, and how will we make decisions and share information?

3. Collective Improvisation vs Defaulting: retreating to the old playbook

This refers to a limited capacity to improvise rather than adapting quickly when the plan no longer fits. Defaulting is not a character flaw. Staw and colleagues showed that threat makes groups narrow their focus, tighten control and fall back on well-rehearsed responses.⁹ Expect it, forecast it, and then you are better able to plan for it. Teams lapse into Defaulting when their capability to improvise is lacking and they start relying on familiar routines, waiting for direction, or applying solutions that no longer fit the situation. Something to try: Agree in advance where people may depart from procedure without asking, and rehearse a few “what if” scenarios so that improvising is not happening for the first time under stress.

4. Psychological Safety vs Distrust: staying quiet rather than speaking up

Psychological safety is a shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks such as admitting an error or expressing disagreement.¹⁰ It is often mistaken for niceness, but it is really what allows hard things to be said early because there is a high-level of trust between team members. Meta-analytic evidence links it to information sharing, learning, and performance.¹¹ When psychological safety is low, teams can slip into Distrust, where people protect themselves by withholding information, avoiding challenge and remaining silent about emerging issues. Something to try: Leaders need to go first by naming their own uncertainty, asking directly for dissent, and treating the first piece of bad news heard as information, not an accusation. How it is received sets the norm for whether the next issue or concern is shared.

How the Horsemen feed into each other

The Four Horsemen are symptoms of a shortfall in the underlying resource. The symptoms also feed one another; for example, a team that stops sharing information (Distrust) loses sight of shared priorities (Drift). A team that has drifted misses what has changed and retreats to routine (Defaulting). Routine fails to fit the problem, setbacks accumulate, confidence within the team goes (Doubt), and people become more guarded. That sequence is our reading of what can often happen in teams, not an established causal order, but it explains why a small crack left alone can lead to a knock-on effect across the team. The Four Horsemen are not causes of fragility in themselves. They are observable signs that a team’s capacity to adapt, recover and perform under pressure may be starting to weaken.

What you can do

Team resilience is not static

It waxes and wanes, and you can develop it, so a risk identified for a team today does not have to define a team’s future. A quick fix or one-off intervention will most likely disappoint, so keep monitoring and managing. While the evidence that team resilience matters is strong, the evidence for which team-level interventions work best is still contentious, so start small, tweak and check if things change. Timing also matters. Alliger and colleagues distinguish strategies used before adversity strikes (minimising), during it (managing) and after it (mending).¹² Before adversity strikes, strengthen the four resources while doing so is cheaper. During adversity, watch for the 4 Ds and redraw the roadmap as conditions shift. Afterwards, review what happened, repair trust where it may have fractured and carry the lessons back into how the team works.

The leader’s role

Leaders shape the conditions in which the four resources grow or wear away.¹³In practice this means creating clarity on purpose and priorities (guarding against Drift), encouraging constructive challenge and learning (countering Defaulting), making progress visible so that confidence has something to rest on (mitigating Doubt), and making it safe to speak up when problems emerge (reducing Distrust).

Choosing and inheriting teams

Who is on a team may make resilience more or less likely, so selecting based on what a team needs is worth thinking about. If you have inherited a team, individual assessments can help, with some caveats. As team resilience is not the sum of individual resilience, a profile cannot tell you whether a whole team system is resilient. It can show how particular people tend to behave under pressure, and so where a pattern like Drift or Distrust is most likely to start.  

A quick self-check

If you would like a practical way to reflect on your team’s resilience, use the Four Horsemen of Team Fragility framework as a quick sense-check. You can start by asking yourself: Which of these patterns appears most often in my team today? The answer may reveal where attention and conversation are needed before small issues become larger challenges. While the framework draws on current research into team resilience and effectiveness, it is not a validated diagnostic tool. Think of it as a conversation starter that can help identify areas worth exploring more deeply. If you would like to go further, at PBC we work with leaders on team effectiveness, coaching, psychometric assessment and facilitated team interventions designed to strengthen a team’s ability to adapt, recover and perform under pressure.

Andrew Morris

Principal Consultant

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The SHRM Body of Applied Skills and Knowledge® (SHRM BASK®), formerly the SHRM Body of Competency and Knowledge® (SHRM BoCK®), represents the evolution of the SHRM Competency Model by further defining the knowledge areas in addition to the behavioral competencies. The SHRM BASK was developed through a series of large-scale research studies that incorporated the viewpoints of thousands of HR professionals from around the world. It was most recently updated in 2021, and now includes nine behavioral competencies as well as one technical competency.

In addition to describing the HR field, the SHRM BASK is used to define the content areas of SHRM’s certification examinations: the SHRM Certified Professional (SHRM-CP®) exam for HR professionals in operational roles and the SHRM Senior Certified Professional (SHRM-SCP®) exam for senior-level HR professionals in strategic roles. The two SHRM credentials provide reliable indicators to the global business community that the credential-holder is a recognized expert and leader in the HR field with the necessary capabilities in both aspects of HR practice—competencies and knowledge—that are required for effective job performance.

Further, the SHRM BASK is also the common framework for the item writers who develop SHRM-CP and SHRM-SCP exam questions, as well as individuals and organizations developing exam preparation materials. SHRM’s own operations for exam development are separate and independent from its operations for study material development. SHRM observes a strict firewall between these activities to protect the integrity and credibility of the certification exams.

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On episode 151 of The Science of Personality, Melvyn Payne, commercial director at Advanced People Strategies (APS), an authorised Hogan distributor in the UK, discusses finding the right balance between team engagement and psychological safety.

“In the perfect ideal, everybody’s equal in the team,” Melvyn said. “Everybody has a voice. Everybody is comfortable putting their hands up if they make a mistake but then wanting to improve performance.”

What Drives Team Engagement and Psychological Safety?

The environment a leader creates for their team affects both their engagement and sense of safety. High-performing teams exhibit the right balance between engagement and safety. However, many teams tend to overdo one and underdo the other, particularly on senior leadership teams where everyone is a functional expert. These top executives might be more worried about job security, high stakes, and reputation than about sharing responsibility for successes and failures.

Team development sessions can reveal how leader behaviour creates an environment of balance or imbalance. Using the lens of Hogan personality assessment data, APS began to offer a tactical twelve-item questionnaire around safety and engagement. This offering was developed from team sessions where participants seemed to resist confronting issues that were holding back performance. “We’re interested not only in the team working together, but also in individual development scenarios, where [a leader’s] individual behaviour has an impact,” Melvyn explained.

Four Zones of Team Engagement and Psychological Safety

Many teams struggle to function with optimal equality and balance across engagement and safety. The model that APS uses to characterise teams can be described as zones in a four-zone grid:

• The High-Performance Zone – (high safety, high engagement). This team likely feels comfortable expressing opinions and admitting failures and wants to innovate, collaborate, be accountable, and improve. Melvyn described it as a balance between everyone heading in the same direction and having a safe space to operate in along the way.
• The Comfort Zone – (high safety, low engagement). On this team, members likely feel free to speak openly and make mistakes, but they may not hold people accountable for results or focus on achieving outputs.
• The Anxiety Zone – (low safety, high engagement). This team likely has a lot of accountability and drive for results but also high tension, discomfort, or anxiety about how failure will be treated.
• The Apathy Zone – (low safety, low engagement). On this team, members likely lack openness and drive. Melvyn mentioned that absentee leadership can generate apathy in teams.

These zones give information about the overall team, but insight at the individual level is helpful too. Even teams in the high-performance zone may have individuals respond to the questionnaire that they don’t feel comfortable asking questions, for example. “Although on the surface it looks good as a collective, that’s a great discussion point for the team. How do we make these colleagues feel more comfortable around asking questions?” Melvyn said, adding that results are always anonymised.

Even more than individual team members, leaders have a responsibility to respond to team data. If an imbalance is revealed, leaders must acknowledge the personality drivers behind their behaviours that are impacting the team culture. To do that, Melvyn directs leaders to a deep understanding of their Hogan data.

How Personality Shapes Team Environment

The three core Hogan personality assessments provide a portrait of how someone is likely to show up at work, including how they lead. The Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) describes the values and drivers that motivate behaviour from the inside. The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) measures the bright side of personality, or everyday personality strengths. The Hogan Development Survey (HDS) measures the dark side of personality, or potentially overused strengths that can emerge under stress, pressure, or complacency.

A person’s personality data show the degree to which they naturally feel safe in a group setting and how engaged they tend to be. A leader with high HPI Interpersonal Sensitivity will tend to create an environment where people feel welcome to share their thoughts and feelings. On the other hand, high HDS Excitable, Sceptical, and Mischievous scores could indicate a leader who creates an environment where openness might receive negative consequences. An indicator of engagement is the degree to which someone’s MVPI values match company values, with stronger alignment leading to higher engagement. Someone with a high HPI Ambition score will tend to show high engagement, although not universally. Anyone can become disengaged, just as anyone can feel unsafe.

Personalities on Anxiety Zone Teams

When team engagement is high and psychological safety is low, a team is operating in the anxiety zone. This anxiety can be an unspoken cause of behaviour. For instance, one of the APS questionnaire items says: “I’m willing to assert my perspective to get the best result.” Someone who tends to show up as assertive would probably have higher HPI Ambition and Sociability scores. Someone with lower HPI Ambition and Sociability might also be willing to assert their opinion but feel uncomfortable about doing so.

On such a team, even someone with high HPI Ambition scores might be worried about making mistakes. Melvyn finds that members of senior teams don’t want to participate in team development sessions because they are concerned about trying something new and failing. Someone highly ambitious with a high MVPI Power score could feel anxious if they aren’t sure they can win.

A leader with high scores on HDS Bold or Colourful could readily share thoughts and feelings without hesitation while not realising the effect of their behaviour on others. Melvyn told a story about a team session where members reported they did not feel at ease speaking up or asking questions without feeling stupid. The leader’s Hogan data showed they had a risk of shutting others down and dominating the team. Directly after the team session closed, the leader reverted to familiar unhelpful behavioural patterns, telling a team member, “Don’t ever say that to me again.” This exemplifies how a leader’s derailing tendencies directly affect team culture.

Personalities on Comfort Zone Teams

When psychological safety is high and team engagement is low, a team is operating in the comfort zone. Melvyn identified MVPI Affiliation and Altruism as values related to caring for and cooperating with one another. High HPI Interpersonal Sensitivity also relates to getting along. On the dark side of personality, the HDS scales of Cautious, Dutiful, and Leisurely can influence someone’s desire to maintain relationships at the expense of engagement—to ignore the elephant in the room, so to speak.

Melvyn described a senior HR team with high MVPI Altruism and Affiliation scores that prioritised a high degree of psychological safety. Leaders outside of the team wanted the HR team to challenge their thinking around business and strategy as well as deliver HR solutions. Within the team itself, members were highly engaged and clear on expectations, but they paid less attention to their reputation across the broader organisation. “What people wanted from them was over and above what they thought people wanted. It’s all about reputation, perception, and other people’s reality,” Melvyn explained.

How to Rebalance Teams

Rebalancing a team rarely calls for big changes. Often a leader needs to adapt specific behaviours to build more accountability or trust. This begins with recognising gaps between how they see themselves and how others see them, or their identity versus reputation. “The premise behind Hogan is creating that self-awareness about how we come across,” Melvyn said. “We always suggest to leaders, how do you create feedback loops so you can calibrate how the behaviour is playing out?.”

Teams need that rebalancing process also. A psychologically safe team that doesn’t hold itself accountable can learn to ask sharper questions that drive improvement. Although engagement and safety can differ greatly by team, the key is alignment. “For teams, do we have an agreed, consistent approach that’s right for our context?” Melvyn said. What matters is that everyone agrees on the method up front and calls it out when the method stops working.

Balance isn’t a fixed state but an evolving practice. As leadership effectiveness, team dynamics, and ways of working shift, the relationship between team engagement and psychological safety alters too. High-performing teams keep asking two questions to maintain balance: what’s working well, and what do we need to focus on next?

Listen to this conversation in full on episode 151 of The Science of Personality.

*This article originally appeared on Hogan Assessments.

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Although burnout is the result of unmanaged chronic workplace stress,² it’s not an exclusively individual problem. It’s also an organisational phenomenon with organisational causes and remedies. Due to this complexity, among other reasons, burnout is not a simple issue to address. Still, many talent professionals are tasked with the challenge of retaining and engaging burned-out workers—sometimes while facing burnout themselves.

Read on to discover causes of employee burnout, individual differences in burnout, and how personality can help with recognising and managing employee burnout.

Causes of Employee Burnout

Two of the greatest causes of employee burnout have to do with organisational environment and expectations. Employees experiencing a toxic workplace environment are more likely to report burnout and leave their employers.³ Behaviours that contribute to a toxic workplace environment include the abusive, discriminatory, or unethical speech and actions of leaders and peers. Another driver of burnout is the systemic imbalance that causes organisational demands to exceed individual resources, such as when layoffs reduce team size without any adjustment to the team’s required work product.³ This condition leads to unreasonable expectations, overwork, and heightened stress for employees. These issues lie within the responsibility and control of organisations.

While the causes of employee burnout are often organisational, individual differences in personality can explain how burnout affects behaviour. This is why understanding personality is an important metric in understanding burnout. Insights from certain well-validated personality assessments can help leaders, coaches, and talent professionals assist organisations in recognising burnout.

Individual Differences in Employee Burnout

Although burnout can happen to anyone, how likely, quickly, or noticeably burnout might happen varies by person.

Two of Hogan’s three personality assessments can help explain who is most likely to burn out and what kind of behaviours they are likely to exhibit during burnout. The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) provides data about seven bright-side personality characteristics, which are the qualities that facilitate a person’s ability to get along with others and achieve goals. The Hogan Development Survey (HDS) assesses 11 dark-side personality characteristics, or derailers. Dark-side personality characteristics are typically strengths that, when overused, can interfere with professional reputations and careers. Overuse of these behaviours tends to occur when a person stops self-managing due to stress, overwhelm, complacency, or burnout.

Hogan researchers have identified relationships between burnout and scores on the HPI and HDS assessments. Specifically, low scores across the seven HPI scales correlate to burnout, and eight of the 11 HDS scales correlate to burnout.

Hogan Personality Inventory

All the HPI scales were significantly and negatively associated with burnout. The higher that people scored on an HPI scale, the less they reported burnout. Put another way, greater experiences of burnout were related to lower scores on HPI scales. Since it’s typical for people to have at least one low HPI scale, these results affirm that burnout can happen to anyone. If someone seems burned-out, their lower HPI scores could offer insight. Knowing the relationship between personality characteristics and burnout, talent professionals can help people better understand the factors contributing to their burnout.

To put this into perspective, Hogan research demonstrates that low scores on the Adjustment and Ambition scales have the strongest correlations to burnout among all the HPI scales. For instance, someone with a low Adjustment score may be more stress prone and less resilient. If they feel burned-out, they might need to reflect on whether they’ve been experiencing a lot of recent changes and stress. As another example, someone with a low Ambition score may prefer to pursue realistic goals versus difficult challenges. They might need to reflect on whether they’ve been challenged with leadership situations at work beyond their comfort zone.

Hogan Development Survey

Dark-side characteristics are also associated with burnout.⁴ Of the HDS’s 11 scales, scores high on the Excitable and Cautious scales but low on the Bold scale are most strongly correlated to burnout.⁵

Unlike the HPI correlations, the HDS correlations are not all negative. Some HDS scales were positively related to burnout, particularly in the Moving Away cluster of scales. This cluster includes Excitable, Sceptical, Cautious, Reserved, and Leisurely. During derailment, people who score high in the Moving Away cluster tend to withdraw from others. They might act emotionally temperamental, suspicious, risk averse, aloof, or resentful. Among the Moving Away scales, high scores on the Excitable and Cautious scales showed the strongest correlations to burnout:

• High Excitable – The Excitable scale relates to passion, energy, and drive; however, that same passion can also contribute to burnout.⁶ The Excitable scale is strongly correlated with the HPI Adjustment scale. This further demonstrates that individuals who have difficulty managing stress and emotions may report greater experiences of burnout.
• High Cautious – The Cautious scale relates to risk aversion and fear of failure. This HDS scale correlates with HPI Ambition, supporting the notion that individuals who are less comfortable making decisions and taking initiative are more likely to report greater experiences of burnout.

On the other hand, significant negative correlations to burnout appeared in the cluster of scales called Moving Against. This cluster includes Bold, Mischievous, Colourful, and Imaginative. Those who score high in the Moving Against cluster tend to overengage with others. They can seem excessively confident, risk taking, attention seeking, or eccentric. Among the Moving Against scales, Bold, Colourful, and Imaginative showed significant negative correlations to burnout. A negative correlation indicates those with high scores on these scales may be less likely to report burnout, whereas those with low scores may be more likely. Of the three scales, low scores on the Bold scale showed the strongest correlation to burnout:

• Low Bold – As an everyday strength, Bold relates to confidence and assertiveness. During derailment, those who score high on the Bold scale tend to seem aggressive, ambitious, and arrogant. Their belief in their abilities can contribute to a high level of resilience, which might mitigate feelings of burnout.⁵ Therefore, someone with a low Bold score who lacks confidence may be more likely to report greater experiences of burnout.

Burnout might not always be visible. Especially among people with Moving Away derailers, burnout can be difficult for even seasoned talent professionals to detect. Organisations should be proactive about remedying systemic factors in burnout and ensuring their cultures support employee well-being.

How to Manage Employee Burnout

Because burnout is associated with increased mental distance from work,² the ensuing disengagement can be expensive. Absenteeism and decreased productivity from disengaged employees can cost organisations 34% of each burned-out worker’s annual salary.⁷ Organisational intervention is essential to rescue employees from the occupational phenomenon that is damaging to both well-being and profitability.

Such interventions include gathering personality data and educating the workforce about personality characteristics and burnout. Leaders especially need to recognise signs of burnout and build work environments in which burnout is a safe topic of discussion.

Communication

Another meaningful intervention is transparent communication. This is a two-part endeavour. One element is to acknowledge that the nature of work has recently changed and that we all are likely to continue to perform work in a VUCA environment (that is, a work environment characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity). The other element is to set realistic expectations for leaders and workers so that employee daily stress can decrease from its current global level of 44%.¹

Surveys

Implementing an engagement survey to ask employees what they need and want can also help organisations apply targeted interventions. For example, by using a combination of survey data and personality assessment data, a healthcare organisation learned that one category of practitioners desired more recognition. By understanding that group’s particular values and drivers, the organisation was able to be direct and specific in its remedy of providing public acknowledgement.

Leadership Development

One of the best interventions for burnout is to invest in leadership development. Effective leaders build and maintain high-performing teams by promoting strategic self-awareness in themselves and team members. Understanding the role of personality in the workplace can reveal how leaders themselves react to stress and pressure. Those same leader personality characteristics, such as coping with stress or taking initiative, have a huge effect on workplace culture and employee well-being.

In these and other interventions, personality data are key to knowing how to support and retain burned-out workers and leaders. If layoffs do reduce team size, for example, leaders who recognise the personality strengths and limitations of their team members will more effectively redefine goals and reallocate work. They will also be vigilant for and sensitive to different signals of stress from individual team members.

*This article originally appeared on Hogan Assessments.

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Global insights, professional recognition and practical capability development come together to help HR professionals drive stronger organisational outcomes.

Peter Berry Consultancy (PBC) has announced a new partnership with SHRM, the world’s leading authority on work, workers and workplaces, giving organizations across Australia and New Zealand access to a global professional community, internationally recognised certifications, leading research and practical resources designed to strengthen their impact.

For many years, PBC has partnered with HR functions to help address leadership, culture, organisational effectiveness and workforce challenges. Through this partnership, PBC is extending that support beyond organisational outcomes and investing directly in the capability, credibility and professional growth of HR practitioners themselves.

As workforce expectations evolve and organisational challenges become more complex, HR professionals are increasingly expected to shape strategy, influence leaders and drive business performance. The PBC-SHRM partnership aims to help practitioners meet those expectations with greater confidence, capability and influence.

Helping HR Professionals Create Greater Impact

Through SHRM membership and development pathways, HR professionals gain access to:

• A global community of HR professionals and thought leaders.
• Leading research and insights on work, workers and the workplace.
• Practical tools, frameworks and resources that support better people decisions.
• Continuous professional development and learning opportunities.
• Internationally recognised certifications that build credibility and career progression.
• Global perspectives on emerging workforce, leadership and organisational trends.

Combined with PBC’s expertise in leadership, organisational psychology and organisational effectiveness, these resources help HR professionals strengthen their strategic contribution and deliver greater value to the organisations they support.

SHRM Certifications Delivered Locally

Beginning in early 2027, PBC will deliver preparation programs for SHRM’s globally recognised certification credentials:

• SHRM-CP® (SHRM Certified Professional) for HR professionals delivering people practices and operational HR support.
• SHRM-SCP® (SHRM Senior Certified Professional) for experienced HR leaders responsible for strategic workforce and organisational outcomes.

Programs will be facilitated by SHRM-certified PBC practitioners and delivered both virtually and in person across Australia and New Zealand.

Expressions of interest are now open, with the first cohorts planned for early 2027. A joint SHRM-PBC webinar will also be held in October 2026 to explore emerging workforce trends and the future capabilities needed by HR professionals.

Industry Perspectives

“As the role of HR continues to evolve, professionals need access to globally relevant capabilities, networks and insights that help them create value for their organisations,” said Achal Khanna, CEO – SHRM APAC & MENA. “This partnership will connect HR professionals across Australia and New Zealand with SHRM’s global resources, certification pathways and professional community, supporting their development and strengthening their impact in the workplace.”

Emma Berry, Director at Peter Berry Consultancy, said the partnership reflects PBC’s long-standing commitment to supporting the profession.

“For many years, we’ve worked alongside HR and People & Culture teams to help them deliver outcomes for their organisations. This partnership gives us the opportunity to invest directly in the professionals behind that work, supporting their development, credibility and impact.”

“HR professionals are increasingly expected to influence strategy, shape culture and lead organisational change. Through SHRM’s membership community, certifications, research and global expertise, combined with PBC’s practical experience supporting organisations across Australia and New Zealand, we can help practitioners strengthen both their capability and their influence.”

For more information about PBC’s partnership with SHRM, visit https://peterberryconsultancy.com/shrm

Certification course content reflects the SHRM Body of Applied Skills and Knowledge (SHRM BASK®). This course of study will in no way guarantee or assure success on the SHRM-CP or SHRM-SCP exam. Students must use the most recent edition of the SHRM educational products for this course and may not use outdated materials.

About Peter Berry Consultancy (PBC)

Founded in 1990, Peter Berry Consultancy is a leadership advisory firm specialising in personality assessment, leadership development and organisational effectiveness. Combining evidence-based diagnostics with expert consulting, PBC helps organisations make better decisions about talent, strengthen leadership capability, improve team effectiveness and build succession pipelines. PBC is the developer of the Hogan 360 Suite and High Performing Teams Assessment (HPTA), and the authorised distributor of Hogan Assessments across Australia and New Zealand.

About SHRM

SHRM is the global authority on work, workers, and the workplace. With nearly 340,000 members in 180 countries, we’ve been shaping the HR profession for more than 75 years – helping organisations create better workplaces and empowering workers to thrive.

Our work touches the lives of more than 362 million workers and their families worldwide. By improving the workplace, we’re not just helping businesses succeed, we’re helping organizations navigate the real complexities of work at every level to create a better world.

Media contact: Sally Foot, Head of Marketing

Email: marketing@peterberryconsultancy.com

Web: www.peterberryconsultancy.com

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The Pervasive Problem of “People Problems”

Hogan’s research highlights that leaders can spend a disproportionate amount of their time dealing with employee issues. This is supported by data from the Center for Creative Leadership, which surveyed 48,000 leaders across 7,000 organisations.

Their findings indicated that “other people issues”, or people problems, are the number one challenge faced by leaders today across all levels, from frontline supervisors to executives.

These “people problems” primarily fall into two categories:

• Attracting Talent: Over 75% of global CEOs are concerned about finding enough talent to fill necessary roles
• Retaining and Engaging Talent: Leaders struggle to keep top talent motivated and engaged. Employee engagement is a critical predictor of turnover, absenteeism and productivity. Gallup reports that one-third of global employees are actively disengaged, meaning they may actively disrupt business and create problems. These talent issues are particularly significant in service-based industries, such as investment or consulting firms, where people are central to the organisation’s value proposition

Understanding the “Base Rate of Bad Employees”

While there’s extensive research on leadership failure (60-75% of leaders fail to create high-performing teams, a rate unchanged in 40 years), less data exists on the base rate of “bad employees”. Existing estimations vary: one-third are actively disengaged, Pareto’s 80/20 rule could suggest 80% are under-contributing, and the Society for Human Resource Management estimates around 10% of the workforce are toxic employees.

A crucial distinction often missed in research is between incompetent employees and toxic employees.

Incompetent Employees: The “Free Riders”

Incompetent employees are defined as workers who leave work for others to complete but don’t create additional work. Using a “coffee cup” analogy, they don’t drink their share, but they don’t add more coffee or spill it. A prime example is the “free rider” problem, common in group settings where some individuals benefit from others’ efforts without contributing equally. This phenomenon leads to disengagement among those who do contribute, as they feel less motivated to exert effort in subsequent rounds.

Hogan utilises two performance models to assess competence:

1. General Employability: Focuses on people skills (getting along, building relationships), learning skills (adapting, quick learning), and work ethic (reliability, dependability). These three skills are highly predictive of performance across most jobs
2. Job-Specific Profiles: Hogan has identified nine job families and created specific personality profiles that predict performance in those roles (e.g., managers, executives, customer support)

Based on these models, an analysis of 60,000 global job applicants revealed that almost 3% of employees had a “highly unemployable” profile, failing to pass a single one of Hogan’s ten employability or job-family profiles. This group represents the bare minimum base rate of incompetent employees, characterised by emotional erraticism, insubordination, and a lack of drive. Managing such employees requires highly specific instructions, constant reminders, and error correction, suggesting they are best placed in roles where performance is not critical.

Toxic Employees: The “Coffee Spillers”

Toxic employees, in contrast, are defined as people who create additional work or problems that need to be solved. In the coffee cup analogy, they pour more coffee into the cup, causing it to overflow and create spills that others must clean up. Toxic behaviours include bullying, harassment, micromanaging, dishonesty, manipulation, narcissistic behaviour, and causing threats or danger to others. These behaviours often overlap with “counterproductive workplace behaviours” like theft or inappropriate acts.

Hogan’s research suggests that toxic workers often combine lower emotional resilience and impulse control with a tendency to be socially dominant, attention-seeking, and sceptical of others. Unlike less capable workers, they may still be ambitious, but this energy can be directed in unproductive or even destructive ways, especially when combined with overconfidence or a willingness to take unnecessary risks.

Hogan’s research estimates that about 6% of the global working population possess numerous traits of a toxic employee.

The Astronomical Cost of Toxic Employees

Hiring a “bad” employee is incredibly costly. David Jones’s 25-year-old book, “The Million-Dollar Hire,” estimated that a $100,000 salary represents a $1 million investment when accounting for salary, benefits, training, overhead, and replacement costs.

More specifically, research by Houseman and Miner on 50,000 workers demonstrated that avoiding a toxic worker saves an organisation $12.50 for every $1 invested. This is significantly more valuable than hiring a superstar, which yields between $1.95 to $4.88 for every $1 invested. In fact, it takes three to five superstars to offset the negative impact of just one toxic worker. Hogan’s analysis further revealed that while top performers generate 7-19% additional revenue beyond their compensation, toxic employees create an additional cost of 44% on their compensation. These costs are often hidden because toxic workers may also have strengths that management clings to, overlooking the disengagement and turnover they cause.

Scaled up, the cost of toxic employees is staggering:

• United States: Estimated at $286 billion annually
• Australia: Estimated at $38.7 billion annually
• Globally: Almost $1 trillion annually due to just 6% of the population

Solutions: Assessment, Development, and Leadership

The solution to combatting toxic employees lies in a multi-faceted approach.

• Personality assessments are designed to measure enduring personality characteristics that predict a wide range of workplace behaviours and outcomes, including job performance and leadership style. Research shows that certain personality profiles can also be associated with counterproductive or disruptive behaviours when expressed in extreme ways. Using validated personality assessments early in the selection process helps organisations make better-informed hiring decisions and reduce the risk of problematic workplace behaviours, while maintaining fairness and predictive accuracy
• Coaching and Development: While toxic behaviour is difficult to “fix” due to the stability of personality, coaching can be effective for individuals who display only one or two toxic-related behaviours. The approach is to raise self-awareness and discuss desired impact to encourage behavioural change
• Avoiding and Offboarding: The most effective strategy is to avoid hiring toxic workers. For existing toxic employees, offboarding is a valuable step that many managers miss due to the “brilliant jerk scenario” where perceived strengths (e.g., high sales numbers) overshadow the hidden costs
• Leadership Responsibility: Leaders play a central role as they are responsible for hiring, supporting, and addressing toxic behaviours. Their actions and the culture they foster can either perpetuate or mitigate toxicity within the organisation

Key Takeaways

• Employee quality is the number one issue for leaders
• Incompetence (3% bare minimum base rate) and toxicity (6% bare minimum base rate) are distinct problems; incompetent employees require backup, while toxic employees create additional work and problems.
• The economic cost of toxic employees is immense, reaching billions nationally and almost $1 trillion globally
• High-quality assessments are the most effective tool to identify and combat toxic employees

The post The Hidden Cost of Toxic Employees – Why “People Problems” Are Every Leader’s Biggest Challenge appeared first on Peter Berry Consultancy.

The question is no longer simply, what can AI do? It is also, what will humans need to do exceptionally well?

Hogan research highlighted five human capabilities expected to become increasingly valuable in an AI-enabled workplace:

1. Judgement
2. Interpersonal skill
3. Originality
4. Adaptability
5. Character

For organisations thinking about leadership, talent and workforce capability, these five areas raise an important question: can we understand them through personality?

The answer is yes, but with an important caveat.

None of these capabilities can be reduced to a single personality dimension. They are complex workplace behaviours that emerge from combinations of personality characteristics, motivations and behavioural tendencies.

That is where a comprehensive personality framework such as the frameworks underpinning Hogan’s personality assessments becomes particularly valuable. Rather than searching for a single score that represents “good judgement” or “adaptability”, we can examine the broader patterns that influence how an individual is likely to approach decisions, relationships, change and responsibility.

Judgement: Understanding how people make decisions

Judgement is perhaps the most complex of the five capabilities.

There is no single Hogan scale that tells us whether somebody will consistently exercise good judgement. Instead, personality helps us understand the tendencies and potential biases that shape how a person approaches decisions.

For example:

• Higher Bold may be associated with greater willingness to take risks and assume positive outcomes.
• Higher Colourful may increase the attraction of decisions that create visibility, impact or attention.
• Higher Cautious may contribute to hesitation when decisions involve uncertainty or potential downside.
• Higher Learning Approach may increase the desire to gather information and build understanding before acting.

Two leaders may reach the same decision for very different reasons. One might move quickly because of confidence and optimism, while another might act only after extensive analysis. Both approaches can be effective in the right environment and problematic when overused.

Personality data therefore gives organisations a richer way to explore the question: what is likely to influence this person’s judgement, particularly when the situation is ambiguous, high-pressure or unfamiliar?

Interpersonal skill: The personality foundations of EQ

As technology takes on more analytical and transactional activities, the ability to work effectively with other people is likely to become even more valuable.

Within the Hogan framework, two scales are particularly important when considering interpersonal effectiveness:

• Adjustment
• Interpersonal Sensitivity

Together, these provide a strong foundation for understanding emotional intelligence.

Adjustment provides insight into emotional stability, resilience and the way an individual is likely to respond under pressure. Interpersonal Sensitivity reflects tact, warmth, consideration and attentiveness to others.

Other personality characteristics can add further context.

For example, Sociability may support networking and relationship building, while very high levels may also create a tendency to dominate conversations or listen less. Reserved may influence whether someone appears distant or detached under pressure. Affiliation can help us understand the extent to which an individual values social connection and opportunities to interact with others.

This reinforces an important principle of personality assessment: effective interpersonal behaviour depends on how characteristics combine, rather than whether a person is simply “high” or “low” on one trait.

Originality: Where new ideas begin

Of the five capabilities, originality has one of the clearest personality patterns.

Two Hogan dimensions are particularly relevant:

• Inquisitive
• Imaginative

Inquisitive reflects curiosity, openness to new possibilities and an interest in ideas, while Imaginative captures the tendency to think creatively, unconventionally and beyond established approaches.

Together, these characteristics can provide useful insight into an individual’s propensity to generate novel ideas and challenge conventional thinking.

There is also an important watch-out.

The same characteristics that support originality can, at very high levels, produce ideas that are difficult to implement or disconnected from practical constraints.

For organisations, the goal is therefore broader than simply identifying “creative people”. It is understanding how originality is likely to show up, where it will add value and what conditions may help convert novel thinking into useful outcomes.

Adaptability: Curiosity, learning and willingness to change

Adaptability is frequently discussed as a critical future-of-work capability, and personality can tell us a great deal about how readily an individual is likely to respond to change.

The strongest Hogan indicator is Learning Approach.

People who are motivated to learn are more likely to actively seek information, build new knowledge and adjust as circumstances evolve.

A number of other characteristics can contribute to adaptability, including:

• Higher Inquisitive, reflecting curiosity and openness to new ideas
• Lower Bold, reducing overconfidence in existing assumptions
• Lower Cautious, supporting greater comfort with uncertainty
• Lower Diligent, allowing more flexibility around established processes and standards
• Lower Tradition, reducing attachment to established conventions
• Higher Science, supporting interest in evidence, analysis and emerging information

Again, the value comes from considering the combination.

Adaptability is more than being comfortable with change. It involves learning, questioning assumptions, experimenting with different approaches and letting go of practices that are no longer effective.

In an AI-enabled workplace, these behaviours will become particularly important as roles, systems and expectations continue to evolve.

Character: Integrity when choices become more complex

The final capability is character.

As AI creates new possibilities for speed, scale and automation, organisations will continue to rely on people to make choices about how those capabilities should be used.

The team highlighted integrity as a central component of character, including being true to one’s word, treating people fairly and avoiding double-dealing.

Two Hogan scales are especially relevant:

• Higher Prudent
• Lower Mischievous

Higher Prudence is associated with reliability, responsibility and adherence to standards, while lower Mischievous can indicate less willingness to bend rules, test boundaries or take advantage of others for personal gain.

Motivational values also provide useful context.

Within the MVPI:

• Lower Hedonism may reduce the tendency to prioritise what is easiest, fastest or most immediately rewarding.
• Higher Altruism may increase consideration of the impact decisions have on other people.

These insights matter because character often becomes most visible when there is tension between competing priorities.

Policies and governance frameworks remain important, but organisations also need people who can exercise sound ethical judgement when the answer is not obvious.

From individual scales to patterns of behaviour

The most important takeaway from these five capabilities is that personality should not be treated as a collection of isolated scores.

Judgement is not one scale.

Interpersonal skill is not one scale.

Originality, adaptability and character are not single dimensions either.

They are multifaceted behaviours that emerge through the interaction of personality characteristics, values, strengths and potential derailers.

This is also why sophisticated personality assessment becomes more valuable as work becomes more complex.

A single trait may tell us something useful. A broader personality profile allows us to understand how different tendencies may work together, where strengths are most likely to emerge and where an individual may need greater self-awareness or support.

The human advantage in an AI-enabled workplace

AI will continue to change the activities people perform and the capabilities organisations value.

Yet the increasing importance of judgement, interpersonal skill, originality, adaptability and character points to something fundamental: the future of work will still depend heavily on understanding human behaviour.

Personality provides a powerful lens for doing that.

Through a deeper understanding of how people are likely to think, relate, learn, decide and respond under pressure, organisations can make more informed decisions about leadership development, selection, succession and workforce capability.

The opportunity is therefore greater than identifying whether someone “has” a particular future-ready capability.

It is understanding the personality patterns that shape how they are likely to demonstrate it, where it may become a strength, and what could get in the way.

As AI capability increases, that depth of human insight may become more valuable than ever.

The post The Five Human Capabilities That Matter More in the AI Era, and What Personality Can Tell Us About Them appeared first on Peter Berry Consultancy.