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.

At Hogan, we call this type of leader behaviour Mischievous. Someone with Mischievous tendencies is likely to seem bright, charming, impulsive, and limit testing. In leadership, risk-taking can yield positive outcomes when leaders find the right balance.

Understanding the Risk-Taking Leadership Style

The Hogan assessments measure three aspects of personality: the bright side (everyday personality), the dark side (potential derailers), and the inside (motives and values). One of our three core assessments, the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), describes the dark side of personality, or how someone is likely to behave if stress, pressure, boredom, or complacency causes them to stop self-monitoring. Dark-side characteristics, or derailers, are counterproductive behaviours that can hinder career success. Mischievous is one of the 11 derailers Hogan measures using the HDS.

The HDS Mischievous scale measures behaviours ranging from quiet and conforming to charming and risk-taking. At first impression, leaders who tend toward risk-taking behaviour can seem engaging. They usually make quick decisions, seem fearless, and avoid dwelling on mistakes, making them excellent entrepreneurs. People who score high on Mischievous will enjoy testing limits and seek out variety to alleviate boredom. They often live out the saying that it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

This risk-taking style of leadership can be highly effective. Using charm to build rapport is a valuable skill for networking and engagement. Likewise, challenging rules and bypassing procedure to achieve goals can be productive. Leaders with high Mischievous behaviour must maintain balance to discern which risks are worth taking and when.

Signs of Impulsive Leadership

A Mischievous style of leadership without any checks and balances can cause lasting negative consequences for leaders’ reputations. Caricatures of risk-taking behaviour in leaders include Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones, Tyler Durden in Fight Club, and Commodus in Gladiator. These fictional portrayals show people who believe that if they don’t dominate others, they’ll be dominated. To them, breaking rules and exploiting others’ weaknesses is justifiable because they are smart or important enough to get away with it.

Leaders with risk-taking behaviour patterns can appear defiant, hasty, or manipulative at their worst. Stress or boredom can trigger a leader to deliberately bend or break inconvenient rules. Their impulsivity is compounded when they ignore or dismiss the long-term consequences of their actions. At worst, they use charm to manipulate others to advance a personal agenda.

A risk-taking leader in derailment can fracture team trust by failing to follow through, alienate good organisational citizens by ignoring limits, and lose credibility by taking irrational risks. Even though such a leader might maintain strong upward and outward relationships, direct reports are likely to see Mischievous behaviours during times when the leader isn’t self-monitoring.

How to Balance Mischievous Tendencies

Using the stop-start-continue framework, a Mischievous leader can learn to balance risk-taking tendencies.

Mischievous leaders should start identifying triggers of derailing behaviour. Many people who have high Mischievous scores hate to feel bored. A leader who is aware of their risk-taking impulses will be better equipped to exercise strategic self-awareness and manage their reputation.

They should stop viewing other people as obstacles to manage. Instead, they should start looking to them as allies. A circle of trusted peers and team members can hold Mischievous leaders accountable to their commitments, counterbalance impulsivity when needed, and share information about how others might perceive them. Assessment-based coaching can assist in designing context-specific development goals.

They should keep questioning whether rules are necessary. Often in bureaucracy, procedures are holdovers from prior leaders and may hinder progress. Mischievous behaviour can also drive innovation when it earns buy-in from others and builds excitement. The main trick is knowing when it’s too much versus just right.

Expert Contributor

Ryan Rush, PhD, is a cognitive psychologist who works as a senior consultant on the talent solutions team at Hogan Assessments.

*This article originally appeared on Hogan Assessments.

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When not managed, perfectionism at work can turn into micromanagement. To executives, a manager who focuses on details and quality may appear ideal, but direct reports know the truth. Leaders who lean too much on perfectionism seem controlling and stubborn. This can leave employees feeling alienated, disempowered, and distrusted. At Hogan, we call this behaviour Diligent.

Signs of Perfectionism at Work

Diligent is one of 11 scales on the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), a personality assessment that measures potential derailers. A derailer is an unsustainable, maladaptive behavioural pattern. Derailment occurs when perfectionism crosses the line into micromanagement.

The HDS Diligent scale concerns a range of behaviour from relaxed, tolerant, and willing to delegate (low scores) to meticulous, picky, and critical (high scores). At their best, managers who have high Diligent scores may come across as organised, detail oriented, exact, and conscientious. They tend to set extremely high standards for themselves and others. At their worst, perfectionistic managers may seem critical and obsessive.

As individual contributors, people with high Diligent behaviour excel in attention to detail and perform at an elite level. They usually accomplish whatever they set out to achieve with excellence in goal setting and progress tracking. However, in leaders, this drive for quality can often come at the cost of relationships with their teams. When they publicly criticise employees’ performance (Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada) or harangue employees about report cover sheets (Bill Lumbergh from Office Space), their perfectionism at work has gone too far toward detail obsessed and nitpicky.

When Perfectionism Becomes a Problem

Holding high performance standards is a strength, but expecting constant perfection isn’t reasonable. Leaders with unmanaged Diligent behaviours appear rigid and inflexible about quality, details, schedules, timing, rules, and procedures. They embody the idiom about not seeing the forest for the trees: being so focused on details that they miss the broader context. This granular perspective can hold leaders back from succeeding in senior roles.

A Diligent leader’s unattainable standards can frustrate even the highest-performing team members. High Diligent behaviour can also cause a lack of ownership, growth, or development among team members. If a leader struggles to delegate, their team can lose essential experiential learning. A leader who just does the work themselves keeps employees from exercising and developing their skills. Employees may ultimately become disengaged because they simply expect their boss to redo their work. Over time, the Diligent leader might develop a reputation of being hard to work for.

How to Manage Micromanagement

Those who are prone to micromanagement should keep their commitment to quality but moderate their perfectionistic tendencies when needed.

Appropriate delegation is one of the best skills for a perfectionistic leader to practice. Trusting that others will do their work effectively, even if the work doesn’t align neatly with the leader’s personal preferences, is essential for team harmony. Delegation challenges leaders to shift their mindset from controlling processes to building capability among their team members.

Partnering with people who have complementary strengths can help mitigate perfectionism. A trusted colleague or coach, for instance, can interrupt unproductive behaviour or encourage meeting expectations instead of exceeding them. For accountability, leaders can communicate these development goals to the team and discuss responsibility adjustments and delegation.

Finally, redefining perfection will be important. As leaders advance, maintaining control over every detail is both detrimental and impossible. Senior and executive leaders must prioritise strategy rather than tactics and evaluate the results rather than the process. They must stop demanding the right way and learn to accept a good way.

Expert Contributor

Cecelia Gordon, PhD, is an industrial-organisational psychologist who works as a consultant on the talent solutions team at Hogan Assessments.

*This article originally appeared on Hogan Assessments.

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Our new whitepaper, The Core5 Model of Leadership Effectiveness, introduces a powerful framework that distills what the very best leaders do differently. It combines years of research, Hogan Personality Assessments, Hogan 360 data, and the Hogan Competency Model to give leaders and organisations a clear roadmap to success.

The Five Core Competencies That Set Elite Leaders Apart

Through our research, we’ve identified five meta-competencies that consistently define effective leaders. Together, they form the Core5 Model of Leadership Effectiveness:

1. Credibility – Acting with integrity, reliability, and professionalism. Leaders with credibility coordinate resources efficiently and set the tone for quality and accountability.
2. Emotional Intelligence – Managing stress, showing empathy, and building strong relationships. These leaders are resilient, considerate, and skilled at bringing people together.
3. Achievement Focus – Competitive and driven, they set clear goals, push for results, and take initiative without waiting for direction.
4. Strategic – Visionary leaders who think big-picture, make smart decisions, and drive innovation, even in the face of obstacles.
5. Inspiring – Leaders who motivate and influence others, build high-performing teams, and create environments where people want to give their best.

These five dimensions are measurable and improvable, and they link directly to leadership performance

Why Leadership Matters More Than Ever

The whitepaper makes it clear: leadership is the most consequential force in business. It shapes culture, drives engagement, and ultimately determines results. As Dr. Robert Hogan says, “Leadership is a resource for the group. It should be evaluated in terms of team performance compared to other teams engaged in the same activity.”

Elite leaders don’t just manage tasks—they align people to purpose, strategy, and performance. They understand that being an employer of choice means building winning teams, enriching the customer experience, and creating workplaces where people thrive.

From Insight to Impact

The Core5 Model isn’t just theory. It’s designed to be practical, evidence-based, and actionable. Using Hogan assessments and coaching, leaders can:

• Build self-awareness and identify derailers.
• Translate 360 feedback into targeted development.
• Invest in high-performing teams as the true unit of performance.
• Drive strategic clarity and engagement across the organisation.

Download the full whitepaper to explore how the Core5 can transform leadership capability in your organisation.

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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.

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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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Overall global employee engagement may be down three percentage points since 2022,¹ but the manager engagement numbers are even more concerning. Global manager engagement, which was 31% in 2022, fell to 22% in 2025.¹ That’s nine percentage points in four years. Manager engagement has never dropped so much so fast.

Declining manager engagement is the primary driver of the broader downturn in employee engagement, which cost the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity last year.¹ The steep downward trajectory of manager engagement also bodes ill for many other crucial organisational outcomes: the well-being of employees, team effectiveness, and leadership pipelines.

How should organisations respond? First, understand why manager engagement is declining. Then, implement a data-driven talent management strategy to identify and support managers.

Why Is Manager Engagement Declining?

The role of manager is under stress from all sides. Executives expect managers to carry out strategic vision with fewer resources, smaller staff, and less operational support. Teams expect managers to show both technical expertise and leadership skills, even when no management training is provided. Externally, the rise of an AI-driven workplace creates uncertainty about job transformation. Internally, millennials—now the greatest share of managers in the workforce—are struggling to balance caring for their children and their parents while earning less, paying more, and maintaining mental well-being in an uncertain global economy and job market.²

Disproportionately, the managers whose engagement seems to be affected most are women.³ Not only is management challenging, but systemic issues seem to impede women at work generally. Nearly half a million women left the US workforce in 2025, 58% of which were voluntary exits.⁴ Why would so many women leave? Hogan research proves women leaders do not lack ambition. But the gender pay gap widened for the second consecutive year in the US.⁵ And the US does not have a national paid parental leave law. And the cost of childcare has increased faster than inflation since 2024.⁶ And while more women work from home than men,⁷ companies are shifting back to fully in-office jobs.⁸

Organisations cannot control economic uncertainty, AI disruption, or the caregiving pressures reshaping the workforce. But they can control one critical variable: who they put in management roles and whether those people have the capability to lead effectively under pressure. Without objective assessment of personality and leadership capability, organisations risk promoting high performers who succeeded as individual contributors but lack the resilience and interpersonal skills to lead teams through ambiguity, conflict, and stress.

Understanding Manager Personality

Leadership, which is the ability to build and maintain a high-performing team, requires organisations to redefine how they identify effective managers. All too often, managers are high-performing individual contributors who were promoted as a reward. However, the skills of a technical expert are not necessarily those of an effective manager. Managers accomplish work by means of their teams, so how they lead is integral to how successful they are in management.

The capability to lead an engaged, driven team has more to do with how someone tolerates pressure, makes decisions, and fosters trust than how charismatic they seem. A manager needs to show integrity, accountability, teamwork, and resilience. Organisations must focus on objective qualifications such as personality when selecting managers.

Personality Predicts Performance

Data from personality assessments can predict how an individual is likely to perform in a management role. For instance, measuring someone’s degree of resilience shows how they will likely handle stress, manage conflict, and deal with ambiguity as a manager.

Of course, resilience isn’t the only characteristic of a good manager. Organisations should assess managers for adaptability, emotional intelligence, learning mindset, influence, and other key capabilities. Workplace context, from company size and culture to team dynamics, also influences which competencies are essential at different managerial levels. A more equitable selection process based on personality and skills may reduce similarity bias, benefit women by increasing representation in the manager role, and mitigate future disengagement. Consider this: women comprise only 42% of US managers and 39% of senior managers.⁹

By selecting managers based on personality characteristics that predict performance in the role—rather than past individual achievement—organisations are more likely to identify people who can actually succeed in management. This reduces the likelihood of placing someone in a role where they’re likely to struggle. Yet selecting the right person is only the starting point. Even managers with the right personality characteristics need support. This includes training and development opportunities, clarity about expectations, and policies that signal the organisation values their well-being. These investments work together to cultivate manager engagement.

Improving Manager Engagement

Organisations can improve manager engagement through targeted development. People with strong support are more likely to succeed in a role than those without. But as of 2024, 56% of global managers had received no formal training or development support at all.³ This gap harms revenue, increases stress and inefficiency, and drives turnover.

Manager development includes training, coaching, and support informed by talent insights. Training might look like a virtual seminar about conflict resolution or a framework for performance reviews. But data-driven talent insights make development more strategic and targeted. Knowing that delivering results is an essential competency for managers in finance, a savvy investment company could design development that addresses this specific need.

The ROI on Manager Development

Development initiatives are worth it. Organisations that provide management training and development see a rise in manager engagement and performance, as well as team engagement and performance.³ The outcomes of such training and development (increased retention, increased productivity, and lower HR costs) could readily yield an ROI of 500% or even greater.¹⁰

Supporting Managers Benefits Everyone

In addition to development, organisations can also improve manager engagement by implementing policies and practices to support occupational well-being. For example, conducting a pay equity analysis signals a commitment to fairness for all employees. These supports help everyone, but especially women, who had the steepest engagement decline. Even if paid parental leave is not legally required, an organisation can still create policies to support new parents. Investing in the people who lead teams improves team engagement too.

Improving Team Engagement

Manager influence accounts for 70% of team engagement, meaning that manager engagement has a multiplier effect on everyone they lead.³ The relationship people have with their manager ranks among the top factors in overall job satisfaction, second only to relationships with coworkers.¹¹ Strengthening the manager-team relationship may be one of the most impactful ways for organisations to improve engagement.

Our definition of effective leadership focuses not on the leader’s performance but on the performance of their team. This positions managers as a resource for their teams. Refining talent strategy around management therefore yields downstream dividends for team productivity. In fact, one study showed team engagement rose by 18% when leaders received best practice training.³

Simply put, engaged teams result from engaged managers.

The manager engagement crisis signals a pivotal moment for organisations ready to rethink their talent strategies. Organisations must objectively select effective managers using personality assessment. They should equip managers with opportunities for training and development and build supportive policies. They must cultivate manager engagement since motivated managers inspire high-performing teams. These strategic efforts will pay dividends across every level of the organisation.

*This article originally appeared on Hogan Assessments.

References

1. Gallup. (2026). State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx
2. Lichtenberg, N. (2025, July 23). Millennials Are Officially the Majority of Managers—So Get Ready for a Combination of Burnout, Buddy Vibes, and Boundary Issues. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2025/07/23/millennial-managers-burnout-cool-boss-boundary-issues-glassdoor-worklife-trends-daniel-zhao/
3. Gallup. (2025). State of the Global Workplace: 2025 Report.
4. Travis, M. (2026, January 29). Women Exiting Workforce at Record Pace, New Catalyst Data Reveals Why. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelletravis/2026/01/29/women-exiting-workforce-at-record-pace-new-catalyst-data-reveals-why/
5. US Census Bureau. (2025, September 9). Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2024. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/income-poverty-health-insurance-coverage.html
6. Elkeurti, A., & Miller, C. C. (2026, March 5). Why Does Child Care Seem Less Affordable Than Ever? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/05/upshot/child-care-expensive-prices.html
7. US Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025, June 6). Telework or Work at Home for Pay. https://www.bls.gov/cps/telework.htm
8. Merritt, K. (2026, April 23). Remote Work Statistics and Trends for 2026. Robert Half. https://www.roberthalf.com/us/en/insights/research/remote-work-statistics-and-trends
9. Krivkovich, A., Goldstein, D., & McConnell, M. (2025, December 9). Women in the Workplace 2025. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/women-in-the-workplace/
10. SHRM Labs. (n.d.). Measuring the ROI of Your Training Initiatives: Unlocking Insights into the Effectiveness of Your Employee Development Programs. SHRM Labs. https://www.shrm.org/labs/resources/measuring-the-roi-of-your-training-initiatives
11. Lin, L., Horowitz, J., & Fry, R. (2024, December 10). Most Americans Feel Good About Their Job Security But Not Their Pay. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/12/10/job-satisfaction/

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On episode 150 of The Science of Personality, Hogan’s Managing Director of Asia Pacific Krista Pederson, PhD, and Senior Consultant of Asia Pacific Nicole Dickie, MS, discuss key findings of the Global Leadership Effectiveness Study and implications for leaders around the world.

Our report, The Leadership Divide, contains personality assessment data from more than 21,000 executives in Hogan’s global database and survey responses from nearly 10,000 full-time employees around the world. Let’s explore.

What Is the Global Leadership Effectiveness Study?

As the global authority on leadership and job performance, Hogan Assessments differentiates between effective leadership and emergent leadership. Effective leaders focus on supporting their teams to perform and compete; emergent leaders focus on getting into positions of leadership and reaching the top. “We challenge people to think about what actions a leader needs to do to become effective,” said Krista.

Generally, effective leaders excel at casting a vision, making good decisions, and showing integrity, competence, and humility. But instead of surveying only leaders, the Global Leadership Effectiveness Study focuses on the perspective of employees. How do workers from different global markets describe effective leaders? Are those the people that organisations tend to promote?

Theoretical Background and Methodology

Implicit leadership theory informed the background of our study. “Every person has an unconscious, personal idea of what makes a leader,” Nicole explained. “When you evaluate someone as a leader, you’re willing to follow them. Our goal was to use information about respondents’ perceptions of an ideal leader to help develop current and future leaders.”

We used Hogan’s Job Evaluation Tool, or JET, to administer our survey. While a typical job analysis would survey subject-matter experts and incumbents about what success requires in a particular job (for example, accountant), this survey considered anyone who has ever had a boss to be a subject-matter expert on what success requires in an ideal leader. For each item, the survey presented a behavioural statement and asked respondents to rate the behaviour on a five-point scale (very good to very bad) for an ideal leader. For instance, global respondents said that the ability to see things from the perspective of others was very good for ideal leader performance. Perspective-taking was the top endorsed behaviour for ideal leaders around the world.

After collecting data on the leaders that people want, we compared their responses to the personality data of existing leaders. Our findings? We uncovered a concerningly large leadership divide.

The Leadership Divide: A Gap Between the Leaders We Have and the Leaders We Want

The leaders that organisations promote are not necessarily the leaders people want. Compare the five highest-ranking competencies of current global leaders with the competencies that global respondents want to see in their leaders.

The Leaders We Have

1. Inspiring others
2. Competing with others
3. Presenting to others
4. Taking initiative
5. Driving innovation

These behaviours correspond closely to those of emergent leaders, or leaders who strive to attain positions of leadership.

The Leaders We Want

1. Effective communication
2. Effective decision-making
3. Accountability
4. Integrity
5. Leadership ability (supporting team performance)

Respondents prioritised effective leadership characteristics, such as communicating to the team, making good decisions, and being willing to admit mistakes. “The leaders that we have are emergent leaders, and the leaders that people want are effective leaders,” Krista said.

What Employees Around the World Want from Their Leaders

The Global Leadership Effectiveness Study produced clear themes on how global employees view ideal leadership. First, they want their leaders to value teamwork and relationships. This relates to the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) scale Affiliation, which measures preferences for teamwork. Global executives score only moderately on Affiliation. However, their followers want them to foster a sense of belonging, help people work together as a team, and place importance on relationships in organisations.

Respondents also want people-first leadership. They positively described their ideal leaders as having energy and drive, being empathetic and caring about people, and being curious and strategic. These characteristics relate to higher scores on the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) scales Ambition, Interpersonal Sensitivity, and Inquisitive. Global leaders do tend to have these characteristics. However, both high and low HPI scores have positive and negative behaviours associated with them. Someone who scores high on Interpersonal Sensitivity is likely to be tactful, empathic, and caring, but they may be reluctant to confront others. This can be an opportunity for development.

Finally, global workers emphatically do not want leaders who show Hogan Development Survey (HDS) behaviours associated with the scales Excitable, Cautious, Leisurely, and Bold. Excitable concerns emotional volatility, Cautious concerns fear of risk or failure, Leisurely concerns being outwardly agreeable but inwardly resentful, and Bold concerns entitlement and arrogance. Global leaders tend to have high HDS Bold scores, positioning themselves as the superheroes who will save their organisations. “The facet of Bold where leaders are entitled was really, really disliked by respondents,” Nicole said. Instead, employees desire humble leaders who admit their mistakes and listen to feedback.

Does Effective Leadership Look the Same Around the World?

Our data show that employees are overall consistent in what they want in a leader (see above). But there are intriguing differences in regional data, Nicole explained. High MVPI Science was more desirable in some regions than others. The demand for making data-based decisions was particularly strong in Latin America (Mexico, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia), Europe (Spain, Lithuania, Romania, Czech Republic, Greece), and Asia Pacific (Mainland China and India). Fifty percent or more of respondents in these countries said that high Science behaviours are good to very good for ideal leadership.

High HPI Prudence was more desirable in other regions. Respondents in these markets want leaders to organise work, adhere to rules, strive for quality, and initiate structure: Middle East (specifically United Arab Emirates), Asia Pacific (Vietnam and Greater China), Europe (France and Spain), and Latin America (Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, and Mexico).

Each country showed individualised and nuanced results. Indian leaders tend to have high Excitable, high Leisurely, high Bold, and moderate Cautious scores. Yet most respondents in India did not want Excitable, Leisurely, Bold, and Cautious behaviours in leaders—a significant misalignment. Conversely, respondents did not prioritise HPI Ambition in Japan, where harmony and group consensus are valued, and this is consistent with how Japanese leaders tend to score. However, in Denmark, where executives tend to have extremely high Ambition scores, respondents did not prioritise Ambition either. Danish respondents perhaps have less concern with competition and prefer cooperation and collaboration.

How to Use These Findings to Develop Better Leaders

“We hope the results of this report can inspire organisations to think about how leadership development programs can better support the needs of the followers,” Krista said. Most organisations assume that leaders know what their followers need from them. Instead, organisations can increase engagement by knowing what teams say they need and providing leadership development to close any gaps. “We should think beyond a leader who can drive profitability and think about leaders who can support the team members,” she added.

Executive coaches can increase developmental impact by focusing on top gaps and themes. Nicole called out MVPI Affiliation, MVPI Science, and HDS Bold. Leaders who prefer operating independently (Affiliation) should learn relationship-building techniques. Practical techniques include informal check-ins, team rituals, cross-team collaboration, and meetings without agendas to prioritise connection. Leaders who rely on intuition and experience to make decisions (Science) should make their reasoning clear to teams, test their assumptions, and use data as an input rather than an afterthought. Leaders who are confident and decisive (Bold) should be wary of overusing these strengths. “We see in the data from respondents that they don’t want to be steamrolled,” Nicole said. “They want their leaders to be open to feedback. They want their leaders to be humble.” She added that coaches equipped with regional data can tailor development goals to align with specific trends.

Overall, the Global Leadership Effectiveness Study shows that employees know what they need to be successful. They desire leaders who are emotionally intelligent and people oriented, driven for excellence and quality, thoughtful and structured, and confident and goal directed. “Let’s listen to employees and see if we can align to meet their expectations to better engage them,” Nicole said.

Download the full report here

*This article originally appeared on Hogan Assessments.

The post The Leadership Divide: Global Leadership Effectiveness Study Findings appeared first on Peter Berry Consultancy.

Some leaders are more concerned with appearing loyal to executives than earning their team’s trust. It can make them seem ingratiating toward authority and unwilling to protect their employees. At Hogan, we describe this type of behaviour as Dutiful.

Characteristics of Dutiful Leaders

The Hogan assessments measure personality strengths, counterproductive tendencies, and values. The Hogan Development Survey (HDS) measures the dark side of personality in 11 behavioural patterns, called derailers. These characteristics may be strengths on a day-to-day basis, but they can cause career derailment when an individual stops self-monitoring under pressure, stress, complacency, or boredom. The HDS’s Dutiful derailer concerns seeming supportive and loyal, at times to a fault.

A Dutiful leadership style can have strengths. In addition to being dependable, these leaders typically have reputations for being flexible, agreeable, and compliant. They can be easy to work with because they accommodate whatever’s asked of them. But when overused, this behaviour style turns into people-pleasing, ingratiation, and reluctance to take independent action. Leaders might seek approval before acting, hesitate to speak up, depend on others for advice, and wait for direction. They tend to be unwilling to challenge their superiors or question the status quo. (Think of TV workplace comedy characters Gabe Lewis from The Office and Tom Wambsgans from Succession.)

Why People-Pleasing Doesn’t Help Leaders

The same dependability that earns trust early in a career can damage a leader’s reputation when used in excess. Without strategic self-awareness, leaders who have Dutiful tendencies can limit their careers, alienate their teams, and hinder organisational outcomes.

Leaders at higher levels are expected to be independent, self-reliant, and willing to take and defend a position. Advancement in most organisations requires a degree of self-sufficiency, decisiveness, and tough-mindedness.

If a leader is unable to make decisions without supervisor approval, their employees might lose trust in them. If they’re too ingratiating to authority, they might not stand up for their direct reports. (Some might describe this as “kiss up, kick down” behaviour.) People-pleasing often means difficulty providing critical feedback, especially in a formal setting. If a leader always withholds their opinion for fear of contradiction, no one can tell what they actually think.

How to Manage People-Pleasing at Work

Dutiful leaders should first acknowledge that deference could be a problematic behavioural response. Understand the conditions that prompt people-pleasing, including general states such as stress, pressure, and complacency, as well as specific triggers. Perhaps a previous work environment discouraged speaking up or unclear instructions resulted in blame.

Then build coping strategies or alternate behaviours by setting development goals. This might look like roleplaying expressing disagreement or giving negative feedback. Deciding on specific criteria for when supervisor approval is needed promotes independent decision-making. Creating a list of ideas for process or strategy improvements and sharing them can be another development exercise for Dutiful individuals to gain practice taking a stance.

The direct reports of a people-pleasing leader should gauge their level of psychological safety in the team or environment. If the environment feels safe, the team could request support or express needs related to business objectives, thus giving the leader a strategic reason to speak up for them. When providing an opinion that the leader might perceive as dissenting, team members can support their case with data and consensus.

Building and maintaining a high-performing team will earn esteem for a leader more successfully than people-pleasing behaviour. Effective leadership sometimes requires the assertiveness to contradict superiors and the autonomy to make an impact.

Expert Contributor

Ryan Rush, PhD, is a cognitive psychologist who works as a senior consultant on the talent solutions team at Hogan Assessments.

*This article originally appeared on Hogan Assessments.

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