Personality: Identity and Reputation

Socioanalytic theory suggest that the inner core of personality—our motivation—is composed of needs that primarily concern the desire to be liked and accepted, to have status, power, or control over others, and to make sense out of the world. The surface of our personality, which is our conscious and unconscious intentions, consists of strategies we have developed to gain acceptance, to gain power, and to make the world predictable, all in the context of modern life. Our need for acceptance and social contact leads to behaviors intended to get along. Our need for status results in behaviors designed to get ahead. And our need for predictability and order leads to behaviors designed to make meaning. These needs are met during social interaction, and the most important differences among people concern how well we get along with others, how much status we have, and how we make sense out of our lives. Some people are more successful than others in attaining these goals, and it is these individual differences that socioanalytic theory tries to explain and that are important when it comes to understanding leadership development.

Our personality consists of two components: identity and reputation. There is the actor’s view of personality, personality from the inside, the inner perspective. It concerns the “you”

that you know—your identity, which also includes your values and is ultimately the same as the self. Mead (1934) describes our identity as a result of other people teaching us who we are, but at the same time we also choose identity from a “menu” that is available in our culture. Hogan claims, like Mead, that the self is the core of personality and that it is created during social interaction based on feedback from others. When the self is formed, it guides our actions vis-à-vis others, and feedback from others then further shapes the self.

The observer’s view of personality is personality from the outside, the outer perspective, and it concerns the “you” that the rest of us know, the person others think you are, based on your overt behavior—your reputation³⁸. Identity is the stories we tell ourselves and others about

38 Hogan, in contrast to Alport (1961), claims that our reputations are an important part of personality, because: (a) Reputations develop quickly and are stable over time. (b) Most people spend a great deal of time and energy trying to establish and maintain their reputations. (c) Since the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, and because

ourselves; it is the generic part we play during social interaction. Reputation, on the other hand, is the summary evaluation of our past performances during interactions as shared by the members of our team or organization. These two concepts further serve two different functions for us. We use reputation to describe our past performances and predict future performance. Hence reputations are used to describe or predict behavior. Identity is used to explain behavior. Reputations concern what we do, and identity concerns why we do it.

Social interaction requires an identity because it is our identity that controls the roles we are willing to adopt and how we play them. Our performance and experience in these roles shape both our identities and reputations. For example, all cadets at the RNoNA are supposed to participate in the leadership role, but how they do so varies widely, depending on their identities. At the same time, these identities vary enormously, which explains differences between people.

There are two sets of reasons that account for these individual differences. The first set is biological, while the second set concerns how we analyze the world because what we do depends on what is in our minds, and some people are more insightful than others about how to conduct themselves. The mental models that account for individual differences are (a) our identities and (b) the interpersonal behaviors we have developed to express and defend our identities—which are known as self-presentational behaviors. Successful people know how to manage their reputations and they manage them one interaction at a time. This is self-knowledge from the actor’s perspective, which involves becoming aware of our identities and the self-presentational strategy that we use to support them—being mindful of what we are doing when we interact with others, a perspective which resembles Goffman’s (1959)

“frontstage and backstage.” While self-knowledge, from the observer’s perspective, involves becoming aware of how others perceive and describe us.

Figure 6.1 represents core elements of a science of personality as described by Hogan and Roberts (2004). This model evaluates (a) how we see ourselves—our identity; (b) how others see us—our reputation; (c) the manner in which we interact with others in social

reputations reflect a person’s past behavior, reputations are quite useful for predicting many, if not most, aspects of social performance. (d) There is a well-developed taxonomy of reputations, namely the Five Factor Model. (e) Our reputations reflect the amount of social acceptance and status we have within our community (Hogan, 1996)

roles; and (d) how our identity, reputation, and interaction strategies influence our ability to get along with other people and achieve our goals.

During every interaction, we run a major risk of minor embarrassment and a slight risk of utter humiliation because our reputations are evaluated after each interaction. Furthermore, most people can describe their identities, which is the person we know, but few can accurately describe their reputations, even though they usually care deeply about them. This is the person that others know.

At the same time it is important to realize that there are three sets of unconscious causes that underlie our social behavior. The first set of unconscious causes is biological in nature. We as people are born predisposed toward certain characteristic moods and emotions. Because we live inside our own mood states, they color our perception like tinted glasses, and we tend to think they are universal, that others see the world as we do. They focus our orientations in ways that are simultaneously profound, idiosyncratic, and unconscious, and it has been shown that becoming aware of our characteristic moods can cause problems (Hogan & Smither, 2001). The second set is a function of our natural ego-centrism that we tend to be unaware of, or even ignore: what others expect or believe during interactions.

Hogan and Smither (2001) argue, referring to Eibl-Eisenfeldt (1989), that the rules that govern our interactions are “prewired” in our nervous systems, so that our responses to others do not depend on understanding others or knowing what they expect. Much of our behavior during social interaction occurs automatically and is therefore unconscious.

Politicians, actors, and other entertainers understand this and often undergo elaborate coaching in order to master and control these subtle and otherwise unconscious interpersonal behaviors. Such training should be a major component of any good leadership development program. The third set of unconscious causes comprises the values, attitudes, and norms of our culture that we assume are true and therefore do not question or evaluate. These include, among others, the concept of maturity, which determines how we should treat people above or below us on the corporate ladder.

Re putation

Extrave rs ion Agre e able ne s s Cons cie ntious ne s s Emotional Stability Ope nne s s

Ide ntity Ge tting ahe ad Ge tting along Pre dictability

Role in Interaction Age ntic Role s Le ade r- Followe r Pare nt- Child Communal Role s Frie nd- Foe

Spous e - not Spous e

Figure 6.1 Core Elements of a Science of Personality (Hogan & Roberts, 2004)