Cognipsy - Blog #inclusion

Personality differences in LGBTQ+ managers

Sun, 16 May 2021 15:44:25 +0530

Diversity, equity and inclusion are critical to organizations and leaders today more than ever. While gender diversity and inclusion are a specific focus area for many organisations and researchers, little work has been done with respect to alternative gender and sexualities. We undertook an investigation of personality differences in LGBTQ+ managers and are glad to report some of our findings.

The table below presents the effect size or mean differences for 8 personality factors from SPS-MAX in a sample of 192 employees who identified themselves as LGBTQ+. All comparisons were made with the India National Norm of over 998 sample size.

Personality Factors	Cohen's D
Compassion	0.26
Politeness	- 0.03
Industriousness	- 0.19
Organization	- 0.16
Extraversion	0.23
Social-Agency	- 0.17
Openness	0.23
Creativity	0.28

Adaptive Styles	Cohen's D
Composure	0.56
Moderation	-0.39
Positivity	-0.27
Calmness	0.44

You will notice that while there are many important statistically significant differences, none of them are large differences from a practical standpoint. However, there were interesting patterns when we broke this data point between individuals who are completely out, selectively out and completely closeted.

Personality Factors	Completely Out (27)	Completely Closeted (112)	Selectively Out (53)
Compassion	0.50*	-0.23	0.32
Politeness	0.27	-0.14	0.18
Industriousness	- 0.19	0.08	-0.07
Organization	0.10	-0.18	-0.16
Extraversion	0.11	0.26	-0.28
Social-Agency	0.23	-0.19	-0.27
Openness	0.52*	0.13	0.35
Creativity	0.54*	0.18	0.41

We also looked at Adaptive Styles from SPS Max. The differences in means as a function of pooled standard deviation are provided below.

Adaptive Styles	Completely Out (27)	Completely Closeted (112)	Selectively Out (53)
Composure	0.59	-0.09	0.40
Moderation	-0.17	-0.41	- 0.38
Positivity	- 0.21	-0.38	-0.05
Calmness	0.72	-0.09	-0.15

Conclusions

The effect sizes between straight and cis-gender employees vs LGBTQ+ employees indicate that LGBTQ+ employees are more likely to use composure as a means to adapt. There are definite benefits to LGBTQ+ employees due to this adaptive style, e.g. getting along with others, being patient with others, being measured in interpersonal communication and ability to navigate difficult interpersonal situations without dominating over others. They may also impact LGBTQ+ individuals adversely, e.g. inability to speak up against discrimination, being polite even when display of temper may be warranted and lacking assertiveness especially in conflict or negotiations. On other personality factors there were no big differences. Personality differences are smaller than overall individual differences.

Within the LGBTQ+ community, we see small but critical differences depending on their status with respect to a socialized identity i.e. whether they are out or not. We find that LGBTQ+ employees who are completely out to their colleagues report being more Compassionate, Open and Creative. Completely out employees feel more Social-agency than those who are selectively out. We hypothesize that being less out is likely to make one acutely aware of their out status which may lead to feeling less in control and confident in social settings. More qualitative research may be warranted with this group. With respect to the adaptive styles we found that completely out individuals favored Composure and Calmness as key means to adapt to adverse situations. As expected, we found completely closeted employees scoring low on all adaptive styles. This may indicate a clear adaptive benefit for being completely out in the workplace. Key questions that interest us are - how do completely closeted individuals adapt? Is there a lack of adaptive competence or is it about an absence of a clear style? Is there a lack of general awareness of the adaptive styles in case of closeted individuals?

What's wrong with hiring?

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 18:14:05 +0530

In a world where human resources is trying hard to justify its existence while business quite literally ridicules the people practices, we are often left to introspect about reality. There are two main reasons for this, one, measures of people practices are very subjective (not that they can't be measured) and two, the impact of people practices are not realised immediately and even when realised, this happens very indirectly.

But not all is baseless. One aspect of HR which receives the least criticism and in my view is the least evolved is the hiring function. Addressed as hiring, recruitment or talent acquisition, practices pertaining to the function are in fact the most baseless and unfounded in management science. The measures of hiring function on the other hand are much more objective and can be measured with much more accuracy in a short frame of time.

Lack of Strategic Principles

Would you hire any different if you were to work for a competitor?

Ask this question and if your answer is no, well you are definitely not hiring right. But this clarity is a part of a bigger problem i.e. HR function not being strategic enough and/or not connecting to the business. The kind of people a company acquires is a single sustained source of advantage and a single source of loss too (once hired law makes it difficult to rid of a resource). While you may struggle to meet numbers for the right cost and time, without the broader principles in place, hiring may just not deliver what business needs.

Use of Resumes

It isn't uncommon to come across recruiters who would say that a glance at a resume would clearly tell them about the fitness of a candidate. Well thought out lab studies with resume have provided poor results. Resume/CV do not predict performance at work (r = 0.05 - 0.08), even with scientific methodology, let alone intuitive gut feel. Structured form based applications on the other hand are moderately better, yet disappointing (r = 0.12). 78% of resume/cvs have been found to be not simply inaccurate but fraudulent (SHRM study). So ultimately impressive resumes predict impression management, verbosity, some intelligence but neither competence nor performance. Unfortunately, this still persists as a screening process for hiring at almost all levels.

Unscientific Hiring Criteria (GPA, Campus, Credit Check...)

Use of any hiring criteria must be based on sound evidence. Credit checks, GPA, campus of graduation are criteria that have no basis in management science. Credit checks have small prediction value of (r=0.11) for entry level roles and negligible (r=0.05) for managerial roles. Similarly, GPA only predicts performance in training and the performance in first year post graduation. Post that GPA has meager correlations with job performance across roles. Campus of graduation and GMAT scores can only predict the income of an individual (r=0.49). However, they have no correlation with performance (r=0.007).

Numerous research papers cite that unstructured interviews are the least effective tools for hiring and many have found them to have negative correlations with long term performance. Similarly work experience in years, beyond three years in a role, doesn't predict performance across levels. In spite of their ineffectiveness in predicting work performance, these criteria are basic requirements for entering most organizations. Professional qualifications, reasoning tests, structured interviewing, personality assessments and/or situational judgment tests are far more predictive of performance and yet used the least.

Unrealised value of Talent

While many say its ok to not get the best talent as long as we get the talent we want, it is a grave mistake. If as a company you are that pays at 70th Percentile in the market, having a talent below 70th Percentile is a bad deal. But how do we know the caliber of talent? No easy answers but a good indicator is the selection ratio. If you have had valid screening and selection mechanisms, you should not settle for hiring one of the three best out of 10 candidates. For mass roles within organization, this should be a golden rule when hiring. Usually hiring teams try to focus on meeting numbers for such roles. Besides, every bit of compromise is costly. Consider the fact that with every ten percentile increase in the caliber of talent, productivity increases exponentially. Employee at 90th percentile is at least seven times as productive as the average employee at 50th percentile.

Taming the Gut Feel

Gut feel in all fairness can only be recommended when you have all candidates who seem to do equally well in all criteria of selection. That is the only possible scenario where hiring decisions based on gut can or should be acceptable. Eventually all gut feel amounts to individual projection biases. Any sustainable talent strategy should steer clear from it, not just when hiring, also while making other people decisions.

Qualified Professionals

One reason why hiring professionals excessively rely on gut feel and unscientific practices is because there are no definitive qualifications for being one. One would assume that all recruiters should at least have basic understanding or personnel or occupational psychology. However this is far from what the market demands out of them. Other skills like behavioural interviewing and observation are also equally scarce. The danger of relying on experience eventually leads to a misplaced sense of what is right and acceptable in hiring.

Misleading Measures

The basic metrics that define hiring should be aggressively measured. While most hiring departments today measure, cost per hire, attrition and average time to hire, more important metrics like base rate (what percentage of screen pool was good enough for successive stages) and hit rate (what percentage of hired candidates were good performers) are rarely tracked.

Hiring right is the pre-requisite for all business both operationally and strategically. While numbers and cost factors are important to support business, the strategic component when ignored can corrode the business slowly. A scientific and proven approach to measurement however is necessary to deliver business impact. Its time to transform both our hiring as well as hiring talent.

References and Suggested Reading:

Credit Check Study

The Blackwell Handbook of Personnel Selection , 1st Edition

Oxford handbook of Personnel Assessment and Selection , Nov, 2012

GMAT study

Do psychometric solutions hinder diversity?

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 18:06:53 +0530

Often we are asked questions, on the positive aspects of use of psychometric assessment. Say a psychometrically profiled role is being filled in by hiring candidates who match that profile, does that mean we end up hiring clones? Would it imply that such differences that contribute to attitudinal diversity are hindered when psychometric rules are used for making selection decision?

The simplest answer is both yes and no.

Yes because, theoretically, if a profile can perfectly describe a role, and if that exact profile is used to select for the role, there are likely to be commonalities between all such people selected by these means. However, assumptions made in this theoretical hypothesis are not well founded.

No because, it is almost impossible to find one profile that perfectly predicts performance in a role. Different people use different strategies to succeed at work. So only few variables would be valuable in differentiating the performance there.

It is also impossible to find people with exactly similar patterns of scores, even on 10 traits the chances of finding the same profile are one in a million!

Any psychometric assessment can not describe 100% of all individual differences. e.g. personality can only explain 16% of difference in performance, there is so much more even beyond measures of error that will cause people to be different even with largely similar scores.

Other levels of constructs like attitudes and values also interact with the profiles.

In summary, the impact of psychometrics on diversity is only a theoretical possibility. In reality or in practice, it is very unlikely if not impossible that psychometric instruments would reduce diversity of an organization. In fact, psychometrics can be effectively used to balance attitudinal diversity. E.g. in a prone to risk team, one would want to add a new member who is very cautious.