I just had the opportunity to read Bob Hogan’s recent book Personality and the Fate of Organizations. Always an entertaining writer and speaker (and long-time pan content partner), Hogan outlines how a leader’s personality quite frequently has a clear and direct impact upon an organization’s success or failure. By drawing upon examples from recent business news as well as history, he illustrates his arguments well.
Another chapter of note traces what he calls the ‘personality wars,” the period between the mid-1960s and mid-1990s when there was remarkably little interest in either academic or business circles in the role of personality. In a rather fascinating bit of intellectual and cultural history, Hogan links this to a number of factors including academic debates about what personality theorists should study (neuroticism vs. self actualization vs. mathematically-determined traits), a distracting preoccupation with the role of social desirability in personality assessment, as well a burgeoning interest at the time in both humanistic psychology and behaviorism. (For those who are interested, he then goes on to link today’s resurgent interest in personality to factors including development of the five factor model and the pragmatic realization that adverse impact was nearly unavoidable when cognitive assessments were used for personnel selection.)
Hogan is a well-known personality theorist. As might be expected, the book is scientifically grounded. It is written in an engaging and conversational tone that would be accessible to the layperson, but is also sufficiently unique in its tone and approach to be of interest to professionals as well. I would strongly suggest a place for it in your library.
Reid Klion