Robert Hogan (psychologist)

Robert Hogan was born in Los Angeles in 1937 and grew up in Fontana, California. [1]

While Robert Hogan was in the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps he began attending UCLA in 1956 on a Navy Scholarship, graduating Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1960. After serving as an active duty U.S. Navy officer from 1960-1963, Hogan worked at the San Bernardino County (California) Probation Department from 1963-1964. He began a doctoral program at U.C. Berkeley in 1964 and earned a Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 1967.[2] He was Professor of Psychology and Social Relations at The Johns Hopkins University from 1967 to 1982. He was McFarlin Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at The University of Tulsa from 1982 to 2001. Prior to that, Hogan was Professor of Psychology and Social Relations at Johns Hopkins University. He has received a number of research and teaching awards and is president and co-founded Hogan Assessment Systems in 1987, based in Tulsa, Oklahoma.[3]

Hogan Assessment Systems is a startup founded in 1989 by Drs. Robert and Joyce Hogan. It was the first startup to scientifically measure personality for business. Today it offers products and services in 56 countries and 47 languages. Dr. Robert Hogan remains president of Hogan Assessments. [4]

Hogan has contributed to the development of socio-analytic theory, which maintains that the core of personality is based on evolutionary adaptations. Humans, in this view, always live in groups and groups always demonstrate status hierarchies. This in turn leads to two further generalizations: people are motivated to get along with other group members but also to get ahead (to enjoy the prequisites of status). Hogan, an iconoclastic observer of American psychology, maintains that personality is best examined from the perspective of the observer (reputation) rather than the actor (a person's identity). As a consequence, Hogan has insisted that personality tools should be evaluated in terms of how well reputations (defined on personality tests) predict behavior on the job and in relationships.[5]

Hogan is the author of more than 300 journal articles, chapters and books.[6] His book Personality and the Fate of Organizations was published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates in June 2006. The 167-page book offers a systematic account of the nature of personality, showing how to use personality to understand organizations, to staff teams, and to evaluate, select, deselect and train people. He is the co-editor of the Handbook of Personality Psychology and has published the Hogan Personality Inventory, the Hogan Development Survey, the Motives Values and Preferences Inventory, and the Hogan Business Reasoning Inventory, as well as the Hogan Guide (2007). In 2012 he and Gordon Curphy authored The Rocket Model, a practical model for building and managing high-performing teams.[7]

He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology.[8][9]

Personality and the Fate of Organizations (2006)

Dr. Hogan was deemed by his peers to be one of the world's greatest living psychologists for his contributions to personality psychology. In 2020 he was given the RHR International Award for Excellence in Consulting Psychology at the Society of Consulting Psychology (SCP) annual conference on February 8 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[10]

"In the 20th century, 167 million people were killed for political reasons, 30 million people were killed by invading armies, 137 million people were killed by their own government. So it really matters who’s in charge. I mean, if you get the wrong people in charge, they’ll kill you." [11]

"From the point of view of a lot of economists, leadership ability is completely fungible, completely interchangeable. It’s simply not true. Some people have a talent for leadership, most people don’t have much talent for leadership, and some people are like Muammar Gaddafi, they’re just actually quite disastrous. And the data shows that the personality of the CEO counts for somewhere between 14 and 17 per cent of the variance in a firm’s performance. So it really matters who’s in charge from a financial point of view.” [12]

“Leadership is all about being able to get people to follow you when they are free to defect. And I can tell you where it is relevant; it has to do with, how do you retain high potentials.Because the high potentials are free to defect. So then leadership becomes absolutely essential to keep them on board, because they can take their act elsewhere. If they’re not free to defect, it’s not leadership, it’s something else. This is why I always say military leadership is an oxymoron.Because in the military, they say‘Do this’ and you say ‘Why’, they say,‘These stripes on my sleeve, that’s why.’ Or, ‘I can have you shot if you don’t do it. That’s why.’ That’s not leadership. That’s just coercion.”[13]

“In the context of human evolution, leadership was an absolutely essential resource for the survival of the group. The best-led groups were the ones that prevailed. The worst-led groups ended up being someone else’s dinner. And my point is, people have built-in, pre-wired cognitive categories that they use to evaluate the leadership potential of other people. Because it was so important in the history of the species, we’re pre-wired to be able to evaluate.[14]

• Hogan Assessment Systems