In everyday business language, we often assocaiate “high” with desirable qualities – high potential, high performance, high capability; while low often implies deficiency or weakness. The “more is better” bias is deeply embedded in how people interpret any psychometric assessments. Practitioners and organisations often exhibit this bias when interpreting the Hogan personality inventory.
Among all HPI scales, low Adjustment and low Prudence are perhaps the biggest victims of this trend. In many organizational conversations, these profiles are seen as risky or unreliable. However, this interpretation reflects an outdated diagnostic way of seeing people which focuses primarily on what is “wrong” with individuals instead of examining the adaptive value and leadership potential embedded within these tendencies.
Business psychometrics are not designed as “good versus bad” frameworks, because human behaviour is inherently subjective and shaped by context. Scientifically robust and validated tools such as the HPI therefore assess behaviour along a spectrum, using percentile scores to capture different styles and behavioural tendencies. It is a normally distributed measure of personality where most individuals fall in the middle and fewer sit at the extremes, with extreme scores providing valuable insights into an individual’s distinct approach to work, relationships and challenges. It is a fallacy to assume that low scores indicate a lack or lower ability.
What makes the bias against low Adjustment and low Prudence particularly interesting is that both scales signal predictability to some degree. High Adjustment suggests emotional consistency and composure under pressure. High Prudence indicate a preference for structure, reliability, and adherence to established methods. Organizations naturally gravitate toward predictability because predictability feels safe. However, as business environments are perpetually navigating white waters, organisations are increasingly rewarding leadership for something else: adaptability, experimentation, learning agility, and responsiveness to uncertainty. This demands a more nuanced understanding of how to interpret lower scores.
The Urgent need for Reframing Low Adjustment
Low Adjustment faces an uphill battle against the stigma associated with it as this indicates emotional instability, anxiety, sensitivity to stress, and reactivity. Traditionally, emotional instability or higher neuroticism, has been associated with distress, intrusive thoughts, and negative affect. However, newer research exploring neuroticism and anxiety at the workplace has begun to understand the “bright side” of emotional instability.
One particularly compelling study by Tewfik, Kim, and Patil (2024) examined the relationship between engagement variability, emotional stability, and job performance. The researchers introduced the concept of engagement variability which is the extent to which individuals inconsistently invest cognitive, emotional, and physical energy into their work over time. Employee engagement remains a critical concern for organisations, given the difficulty of consistently monitoring it despite its significant impact on productivity. Interestingly, the research challenges traditional assumptions about emotional stability in performance.
While individuals with consistently high engagement and high emotional stability demonstrated the strongest overall performance, lower emotional stability appeared to attenuate the negative effects of fluctuating engagement on performance. In other words, individuals with lower emotional stability did not experience the same performance decline associate with inconsistent engagement.
The research further aligns with earlier findings suggesting that individuals lower in emotional stability may outperform others in situations demanding significant attentional resources, effort, or concern about outcomes. Their desire to avoid failure or social disapproval can sometimes translate into heightened persistence and performance.
Anxiety, when managed effectively, can fuel preparation, anticipation of problems, attentiveness to risks, and sustained effort. These individuals may remain cognitively and emotionally activated even when motivation fluctuates.
Globally, organisations are experiencing economic and environmental volatilities and therefore the leadership demands responsiveness and vigilance.
Low Adjustment can manifest as passion, urgency, emotional intensity, heightened investment, and deep care about outcomes. Such individuals have distinct advantages as they may anticipate risks earlier, detect problems others overlook, and remain highly attuned to environmental shifts.
Missing the Big Picture: The role of low Prudence
Low Prudence is often interpreted through the lens of what an individual may not do which is establish and follow structure, adhere to conventional systems, or prioritize process consistency. If we recontextualise this for High Prudence, what high scoring individuals don’t do is find alternative ways, move ahead with new ideas or stay open to new systems and change.
Individuals scoring lower on Prudence are more likely to experiment, pivot quickly, tolerate ambiguity and are willing to challenge existing systems.These tendencies can create significant leadership advantages in entrepreneurial, creative, or transformation-oriented environments where excessive structure can inhibit innovation.
Research on learning agility in leadership performance reinforces this point as we continue to experience global disruption and upheaval of traditional systems. Learning agility is defined as the ability and willingness to learn from experience and apply those lessons successfully in new and unfamiliar situations (De Meuse, K. P., 2022). Importantly, learning agility is not simply about intelligence or learning quickly. Rather, it reflects comfort with ambiguity, openness to change, behavioural flexibility, and willingness to experiment, traits which are associated with Low Prudence
As organizations face disruption, transformation, and evolving workforce expectations, they demand leaders who can challenge established assumptions and navigate uncertainty. The qualities that may appear “unpredictable” in one context may become catalysts for innovation and organizational learning in another.
However, it is important to note that Low Prudence is not universally beneficial. Rather, it highlights an important nuance that is often lost in personality interpretation: strengths and risks are contextual. A tendency toward experimentation may be dangerous in highly safety-sensitive roles but invaluable in innovative or growth-oriented contexts.
Jumping to Conclusions: High and Low do not equate to Good or Bad.
The bigger issue in interpretation is not the assumptions surrounding low adjustment or low prudence, but rather the broader tendency to flatten personality dispositions into simplistic judgements.
Leadership assessment should move beyond diagnostic thinking focused solely on interpreting people as good or bad for a job. The goal of personality interpretation is not to identify flawless leaders but to understand patterns of behaviour, contextual strengths, derailers, and environmental fit.
Every personality characteristic exists within a broader adaptive system, carrying their own strengths and liabilities. High Prudence can create discipline and consistency but may also reduce agility and openness to experimentation. High Adjustment can create calmness and resilience but may sometimes reduce urgency, vigilance, or emotional investment.
Ironically, the modern leadership landscape increasingly rewards exactly the qualities organizations have historically viewed with suspicion: experimentation, emotional intensity, and willingness to challenge convention.
Leadership effectiveness rarely emerges from “high” scores or labels of “high” potentiality. Instead, it often emerges from self-awareness and the ability to channel one’s tendencies productively.
The greater risk lies in assuming that predictability is always synonymous with leadership effectiveness, especially when we are operating in an increasingly unpredictable world.
References:
De Meuse, K. P. (2022). Learning agility: Could it become the g-factor of leadership?Consulting Psychology Journal, 74(3), 215–236. https://doi.org/10.1037/cpb0000216
Tewfik, B. A., Kim, D., & Patil, S. V. (2024). The ebb and flow of job engagement: Engagement variability and emotional stability as interactive predictors of job performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 109(2), 257–282. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001129
