Energy & Utilities Industry

Context
One hundred and seven Service Technicians at an international wind energy company provided Hogan with safety data. These employees are primarily responsible for conducting preventive and corrective maintenance on wind turbines, reporting turbine conditions and collecting data for research analysis, and ensuring adherence to safety procedures and quality requirements. As the Service Technicians are responsible for adhering to safety procedures, Hogan examined if personality influenced whether or not Service Technicians performed safety-related behaviors.

Solution
The Service Technicians completed the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI), the industry standard for measuring everyday personality characteristics. Based on the HPI scores, Hogan calculated safety scores and classified the Service Technicians as either having below-average safety scores or above-average safety scores. In addition, Hogan obtained supervisor ratings of safety-related performance.

Result
Hogan found that the Strong and Cautious scales were related to safety performance. Specifically, Service Technicians who tend to be steady under pressure (high Strong), and evaluate their options before making risky decisions (high Cautious) were less likely to receive low safety performance ratings compared to those who tend to panic under pressure and make mistakes (low Strong), and take unnecessary risks (low Cautious). Additional analyses demonstrated that Vigilant was a significant predictor of safety performance (β = -.20). This indicates that individuals high on Vigilant may focus on the task at hand to the extent that they are unable to monitor other tasks, thus becoming more likely to make safety-related performance errors. For Service Technicians, high safety performers tend to be able to stay focused on multiple tasks or aspects of tasks at once (moderate Vigilant).

As displayed in the table below, 68% of employees with below-average safety scores on the Strong scale received low safety performance ratings – 11% higher than those with above-average safety scores on the Strong scale. Service Technicians with below-average Strong scale scores were oneand-a-half times more likely to receive low safety performance ratings compared to those with above-average Strong scale scores. Overall, these results indicate that for this organization, using the Hogan Safety Report to hire applicants in the above-average safety group would have resulted in a 14% decrease in the incidence of low safety performance ratings.