*This is a single installment in a larger series dedicated to examining some of the most popular, influential, and historically important personality testing models and assessment tools.
The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) is an assessment tool that has been used widely in the areas of employment and career development. The proprietary assessment tool was developed and eponymously named by American personality psychologist Robert Hogan. It was introduced and popularized in the 1980s and remains commercially available today
The Hogan test is a personality assessment tool that uses psychometric scaling to measure behavioral tendencies in a wide range of personal and professional situations. The testing company boldly claims “we predict workplace performance.”
While we will neither debate this claim, nor seek to prove it, we will offer an overview of this assessment tool including a look at its history, how it works, and a few common critiques.
What is the Hogan Personality Inventory?
The Hogan Personality Inventory is a personality assessment tool designed to predict how people work, how they lead, and how likely they are to succeed in a given organization.
The HPI is informed by Robert Hogan’s own socioanalytic theory. In the context of personality assessment, socioanalytic theory is based on the idea that human behavior is primarily motivated by two overlapping constructs:
- Getting along with others; and
- Getting ahead in the hierarchy.
The HPI is based on the premise that these are the two dominant themes in human social life, and that how each of us approaches these constructs is a function of personality. Therefore, the HPI is designed to quantify our behavioral tendencies in getting along with others and getting ahead.
The underlying assumption of the HPI is that this measurement can be used to assess personality and consequently predict workplace performance.
How does the Hogan Personality Inventory work?
The HPI is designed to measure what its creator has called “the bright side of personality.” This bright side refers to “how we relate to others when we are at our best”.
The Hogan Personality Inventory test is:
- A 206 item personality assessment instrument;
- That typically takes 15 to 20 minutes to complete;
- And requires the respondent to rate their level of agreement with a range of statements relating to personal preference, behavior, workplace habits and more.
The HPI uses seven different primary personality scales to measure personality:
- Adjustment
- Ambition
- Sociability
- Interpersonal Sensitivity
- Prudence
- Inquisitive
- Learning Approach
These scales are composed of 42 subscales.
Respondents may be scored “high” or “low” in each of the 7 primary personality scales above. However, it should be noted that low scores are not inherently associated with negative performance; nor are high scores inherently associated with positive performance. Instead, these scores are meant to be predictive of possible behavioral tendencies based on personality.
So, for instance, somebody with a high Ambition score may be seen as “energetic,” “competitive,” “restless,” and/or “forceful.” Somebody with a low Ambition score may be a “Good team player,” “Willing to let others lead,” and/or “complacent.”
Thus, high and low scores on the seven personality scales are not correlated with positive or negative performance. Instead, these scores can be used to understand each test-taker’s behavioral tendencies in pursuit of their two key objectives (i.e. Social standing with others; and status within the hierarchy).
It follows that work performance is also directly influenced by our individual behavioral tendencies in pursuit of these objectives.
The Origin Story Behind the Hogan Personality Inventory
Prior to earning a PhD in psychology from UC Berkeley in the late 1960s, Robert Hogan served as a gunnery captain on a U.S. naval destroyer. His military experience would figure directly into his interest in the connection between personality and work performance.
So too would his exposure to a number of prominent personality psychologists during his PhD program including German psychologist Hans Eysenck and British-American psychologist Raymond Cattell. Cattell’s work in particular helped contribute to the development and popularization of the widely influential Five-factor Model (FFM).
The Five-factor Model would consequently help to influence Hogan’s thinking on the subject of personality.
What is the Five-factor Model?
The Five-factor Model (FFM) is based on the idea that much of human personality can be understood through factored analysis of 5 distinct personality traits:
- Openness
- Conscientiousness
- Extraversion
- Agreeableness
- Neuroticism
Though its development began decades before, the Five-factor Model earned renewed attention in the early 1980s and was first used in a commercially available personality assessment tool in 1984. This contributed to its widespread popularity as a mainstream personality assessment tool.
It also contributed to a new generation of ideas about personality assessment, including those put forth by Robert Hogan. In 1983, Hogan published A Socioanalytic Theory of Personality.
At its root, socioanalytic theory is a fusion of three preexisting theories:
- Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, which says that human behavior is driven by a combination of unconscious desires, repressed memories, and unresolved conflicts, often rooted in childhood experiences;
- Freud’s role theory, which holds that individuals play specific roles based on societal expectations and internalized norms, and that both behavior and personality are functions of how we fulfill these roles; and
- Darwin’s evolutionary theory, which argues that species evolve over time through the process called natural selection, in which traits that enhance survival and propagation become more commonplace in populations over a period of successive generations.
Hogan merges these ideas to put forth the following three assertions:
- Human beings require and seek social acceptance; the absence therefore is an existential threat.
- Human beings require status, power and control of resources; the lack or loss of these is also an existential threat.
- Human beings have a deep need for meaning and will seek to meet this need through religion; a lack of meaning is tantamount to existential despair.
These ideas would form the foundation for the Hogan Personality Inventory. In the context of personality, Hogan would argue that while we all share in common these same needs, there are vast individual differences in our ability to acquire these things as well as the strategies we use to do so. In Hogan’s theoretical model, these differences form the basis for individual behavioral tendencies, and thus, personalities.
Hogan first introduced these ideas while working and researching as a professor for the University of Tulsa. It was also during this time–in 1987–that he and his late wife, Dr. Joyce Hogan (d. 2012) founded Hogan Assessment Systems. Robert Hogan would ultimately leave the University of Tulsa faculty to focus full time on his testing company in 2001, and remains president to date.
The Practical Applications of the HPI
The Hogan Personality Inventory is commercially available and still widely used in a wide range of business settings, along with other Hogan assessment tools such as the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) and the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI).
These tools are used by businesses, hiring agencies, and human resources professionals to make recruitment decisions, identify individuals for leadership opportunities, place personnel on suitable professional development pathways, and more.
Primary applications of the HPI today include:
- Employee Selection and Hiring–assessing candidates’ suitability for specific roles, especially leadership positions, by distilling applicant strengths and indicating where new hires might best fit within a broader organization.
- Leadership Development–identifying potential leaders and assessing their ability to handle the demands of leadership by measuring qualities such as ambition, interpersonal sensitivity, and adaptability
- Team Building—helping organizations understand the personality profiles of team members and how different personalities might complement or clash with one another
- Career Coaching—helping individuals understand their own strengths and areas for growth by identifying traits that are related to job satisfaction and success
Common Critiques of the HPI
Despite its widespread use and scientific grounding, the HPI has faced some critiques.
Most notable among them is the overemphasis that it places on its own capacity to predict success. One of the biggest concerns raised by the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) is the absolute nature of its value proposition.
To reiterate a point, Hogan Assessment advertises its HPI as being able to predict job performance. While the HPI may be a useful instrument in helping to evaluate job candidates, one should be inherently wary of any tool which presumes to predict human behavior with this level of certainty. We have often argued that any employment related assessment process should incorporate numerous sources of data.
By claiming its singular ability to predict job performance, the HPI seems to advocate for a process of employment assessment that uses only its methods to the exclusion of all others. This threatens to create an inherently flawed, narrow, and even potentially biased employment screening process.
To wit, while we believe that the Success Portraits Personality Tests (SPPT) are exceedingly valuable for understanding behavioral tendencies and how personality influences action in a variety of workplace settings, situations, and dynamics, we also recognize that other factors including personal experience, intellect, and environment can also help to predict workplace performance.
This is why we frequently argue in favor of utilizing SPPT evaluation alongside a number of other screening tools and metrics. In spite of its usefulness, the Hogan Test proposes to supplant the need for this more comprehensive approach to assessment. From our view, this is inherently problematic in its narrowness.
The SPPT broadens the scope of assessment by evaluating for 19 personality traits, deepens the nuance of assessment by measuring responses in four distinct workplace contexts, and recognizes that personality assessment is only strengthened by the triangulation of data from other sources.
To learn more about the SPPT, and how we’ve worked to build on the successes and overcome some of the weaknesses of prior assessment methods, we invite you to check out our illuminating chat with SPPT creators Fred Switzer and Jo Jorgenson.