Personality And The Fate Of Organizations: My Review

I am going to recommend that you read Robert Hogan’s book “Personality and the Fate of Organizations.” I purchased my copy of the book because Bob Sutton refers to it in some of his writings.

I want to make sure you understand that I strongly disagree with Hogan’s underlying premise – that it’s the people that make the place. My very first post at this site was entitled “Why do people do the things they do?”  If you follow my blog, you know I believe strongly that systems are stronger drivers of behavior than personalities. In the words of Pfeffer and Sutton (2006) “The law of crappy systems trumps the law of crappy people.”

But Hogan’s argument is important to understand, especially for systems thinkers. We need to understand the other side of the argument as well as possible so that we can be prepared to answer our critics, and Hogan makes the case for personality as well as anyone. I frankly learned a lot of new things from this book. And Hogan knows his history, especially the history of psychology, extremely well, and that contributes a unique perspective to his book.

I love Hogan’s no-nonsense writing style. From the moment I started reading I found myself chuckling aloud at some of the things he wrote (yes, I am a nerd). Here is an example of Hogan’s writing, partially explaining his point that two-thirds of the people currently in leadership positions in corporate America will fail:

New executives are often recruited from outside the organization, making it even harder to evaluate them because there is no track record or institutional memory. The most common selection tool is an interview; narcissists and psychopaths excel during interviews. Thus I believe many executives are hired based on characteristics that are irrelevant to their success as leaders. (p. 37-38).

And another excerpt from a section headed “The Origins of Psychological Taxation”:

Every large organization has two groups of people. The first and usually the largest group contains people who perform key work, the activities that actually define the organization…The second and much smaller group contains people who control important parts of the organization without contributing to its core work. These are the politicians who reside in the executive suite. Many of them are free riders – they participate in the profits of an organization without contributing in any direct way to the major work.

Unfortunately, Hogan understands the argument that “the place makes the people” very poorly.  When describing the American Quality Movement, Hogan states:

TQM is inherently hostile to personality; it is based on the assumption that individual differences in worker characteristics are relatively trivial influences on work process outcomes. Workers are “special causes” of errors in a system – they are replaceable cogs in a work process that account for perhaps 10% of the variance in team performance. (p.56).

Anyone that has read the works of W.E. Deming and understands what special causes of variation are will recognize that Hogan’s comments are void of credibility. It’s actually the attribution errors inherent to Hogan’s perspective that is hostile to most workers. I am heavily steeped in quality improvement logic, and you can see it in my statement of purpose “my purpose is to change your mind about the value of partnering with others to build healthy, responsible organizations where everyone can thrive.” This is hardly the philosophy of someone that views workers as replaceable cogs.

As I’ve stated before, I want to understand personality – first mine, then yours – so that I can learn to work better with you by adjusting the thing I have the most control over, my own behavior. I think that if we had a more specific understanding of and appreciation for how we differ as individuals, we could work better together and multiply our efforts to improve our organizations.

Hogan’s approach leaves you spending money on assessment tools like the one he developed so that you can select for personality. This selection approach creates a relatively homogenous organization that effectively minimizes the variation between worker personalities and behaviors. When everyone is more similar than different, it might make your organization easier to manage. But it is based on the very precarious assumption that your organization knows exactly what it needs to be doing and is currently executing with excellence. Systems thinkers strive to minimize the variation between worker behaviors so that they can better understand how to improve the system by shifting the average performance behaviors to levels beyond the constraints imposed by the current system and more in line with the voice of the customer.

Your company’s customers come from ALL different personality types; consequently, to best serve those customers, your employees also need to be made up of all different personality types.  Personalities are relatively stable, not subject to change. It’s important to understand that as a leader, you are not going to change anyone’s personality at work.  But your organization must change if it is going to survive and thrive. The ability to learn and improve is based on your assumptions, not your personality.

Read this book. You will learn a lot, and it will force you to think about what you really believe controls the fate of organizations.

Related Posts:

Bad Employee Attitude. Really?

The Sigmoid Curve And The Paradox Of Change

Excellence Is A Form Of Deviance

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Tags: assumptions, attribution, book review, employee performance, systems thinking
Posted in Leadership, Personality