Are you behind for hiring for values?

Decades of research keep landing on the same finding: culture fit makes people more satisfied and committed, but it does surprisingly little for their actual performance.

Results into an own team assessment made me think; is being aligned on values a good thing or is it not? Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic  made the case in his latest article, that the real cost of hiring for sameness only shows up later. A company full of people who think alike gets very good at agreeing with itself and much slower to notice what it is missing.

Kodak invented much of digital photography and still let the technology pass it by. Nokia led the mobile phone market and still underestimated the smartphone. In both cases the people were talented. They simply shared too many of the same assumptions to see the shift coming.

AI raises the stakes here.

As computers take over more of the technical and knowledge work, what companies most need from people is judgment, curiosity and the confidence to question how things are done. These are the very things a company gives up when it hires only for people like itself. So: are you behind for hiring on values? In my view, not for that. You may be, though, if culture fit has turned into a way of hiring people who mostly think like you.

How does Hogan define culture?

Culture, in Dr. Robert Hogan’s opinion, is nothing more mysterious than the values a leadership team rewards and punishes, day after day, until those behaviours simply become how things are done. Therefore, these values run largely unconscious. Who gets hired, promoted or let go tends to follow from them rather than someone deciding that those decisions should follow from specific values which is how “fit” drifts from shared purpose into shared personality.

This is where the science from Hogan Assessments becomes especially relevant, because it separates two things that “culture fit” usually blurs together:

✔️ Values and motivation, where alignment with the organization’s purpose builds trust, engagement and belonging

✔️ Personality and thinking style, where difference rather than sameness is what keeps a company able to adapt

✔️ Learning agility, the capacity to keep growing as AI reshapes the work, which now matters more than any fixed expertise

The right profile, then, is not someone who simply fits in. It is someone who shares where the organization is going and brings something it does not yet have.

Won’t you just manufacture disagreement by hiring for difference?

Stating Dr. Robert Hogan, the values that actually make organizations effective aren’t the uniform ones but rather things like innovation and change, real delegation, decisions made on evidence rather than rank, and accountability paired with a clear definition of success. When everyone knows what winning looks like, difference stops being a liability. People can read a problem differently and still be held to the same standard of results. Uniformity offers the feeling of alignment, but accountability sets an actual standard which survives a fast-moving market much better.

The same is true of leadership. The leaders who make this work create enough belonging that people trust one another, and enough psychological safety that difference is voiced rather than smoothed over. Strategic self-aware leaders also know their own biases well enough not to fill the room with smaller versions of themselves.

The strongest cultures are not the most uniform – Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic argues. They are the ones secure enough to take in new people and ideas without losing themselves. In the age of AI, that may be the most valuable thing a company can build.

Source:

The Importance of Values | Hogan Assessments Blending in vs. standing out at work: The truth about culture fit – Fast Company metaBeratung – Hogan Distributor Personality Guidance AG Hogan Assessments