Should You Hire for Humility?
Lots of job descriptions require things like the ability to lead multi-functional teams, monitor and control budgets, and manage multiple projects simultaneously. But the ability to self-deprecate? Not so common. That may change after more employers read recent research that found employees who score high on the honesty-humility component of personality tests make the most productive workers.
Baylor University researchers, who published their findings in the April 2011 issue of the journal "Personality and Individual Differences," actually went well beyond stating that honesty and humility are desirable personality traits. After surveying 269 employees in 25 different companies and asking supervisors to rate each on 35 different job skills, they found that honesty-humility was the single best of six major personality characteristics when it came to predicting on-the-job performance.
Caveats exist, however. Baylor studied only health care companies, and honesty-humility was most clearly superior when dealing with difficult clients. In other businesses, or with less demanding customers, it could well be that different skills would prevail. (In my own field, it's not hard to imagine instances in which a talent for, say, martial arts, could be more useful.)
Other researchers have also found that humility ranks pretty high in the personality pantheon. In a 2005 article in "Human Relations," a couple of Canadian researchers found that organizations that perform well over the long term tend to be led by someone who is the opposite of the stereotypical ego-driven CEO. Specifically, they found "a person possessing a blend of humility and strong personal will" was likely to do best.
Why would humble, honest people do better as workers or as leaders? An article in the November 2010 "European Journal of Personality" boiled it down to this: People soaked in honesty and humility cause less trouble -- they called it "counterproductive work behavior" -- in response to organizational politics. The opposite was true of those who scored low on honesty and humility. "In other words, employees low in honesty-humility were especially likely to condition their behaviour on environmental factors, a result that mirrors previous findings," the researchers wrote.
Sounds like hiring for humility could increase productivity while at the same time it make your life as an employer easier. Now if you could just tell the difference between honest humility and the fake kind.
Mark Henricks has reported on business, technology and other topics for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, and other leading publications long enough to lay somewhat legitimate claim to being The Article Authority. Follow him on Twitter @bizmyths.
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