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Personality and the Fate of Organizations

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Hogan, Robert. Personality and the Fate of Organizations. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2007.

…all managerial jobs have one important feature in common: They help accomplish the work of an organization through other people. This means that managers are responsible for the performance of their staffs.

The word leadership has two meanings. On the one hand, leadership refers to a certain kind of position in an organization–a leadership position. On the other hand, leadership refers to a kind of performance–behaving in a leader-like way.

By definition, managers are in positions of leadership; whether they exercise it appropriately is another question.

The published literature on leadership is immense–actually overwhelming–and growing daily.

Effective leaders tend to be resilient and handle stress well, they promote a vision and develop strategies to translate the vision into reality, they solve tactical and strategic problems, they set high goals and work hard to achieve them, they project a sense of self-confidence, they build relationships, they build teams, they follow through on their commitments and treat people fairly, and they plan and organize work. These attributes are no guarantee of success, but they improve the odds of a person being able to build a high-performing team that achieves results.

…bad management is the primary cause of employee dissatisfaction–the best predictor of employee dissatisfaction is poor leadership.

…bad managers create turnover–people do not quit organizations, they quit bad bosses. …