Why do some leaders consistently make better decisions than others? Does their success rest on an exceptional capacity for analysis, on intuition, or on deeper features of their personality?
A century of psychological research shows that decision making is far from a purely rational process. Our choices are shaped by our personal preferences, our attitude to risk, the way we process information and, above all, how we react to getting things wrong.
In this article, Robert Hogan and Adrian Furnham explore four major dimensions of decision making and examine how the eleven behavioural tendencies measured by the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) can sway the decisions of leaders, especially when they are under pressure.
Essential reading for professionals in Talent Management, personality assessment and leadership development who want a better grasp of the psychological factors behind performance, and who wish to make appointment, promotion and leadership support decisions on firmer ground.
It is hardly surprising that so much effort has gone, over the years, into analysing how great leaders reach their decisions. Are they all masters of reasoning grounded in facts and evidence, or do they rely mainly on their intuition?
In the view of Robert Hogan (Hogan Assessments) and Adrian Furnham (BI Norwegian Business School), the truth lies, as it so often does, somewhere between those two extremes, across a broad spectrum of personality characteristics.
So what have a hundred years of psychological research taught us about decision making?
The scientific literature on the subject is vast. Here the authors choose to adopt one particular lens: that of personality psychology. Their interest focuses more specifically on how business leaders go about making their decisions.
Human beings are not especially good at making decisions.
Through a run of ingenious experiments, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman demonstrated just how heavily cognitive biases colour our everyday choices.
Their work challenged the core assumption of traditional economics that individuals decide rationally. This contribution earned Kahneman the Nobel Prize in economics.
Their findings echo Sigmund Freud's view that people are fundamentally irrational, while being remarkably skilled at producing "rationalisations" to justify what they have decided.
The myth of the cold, logical and perfectly rational leader has thus been exposed for what it is: a myth.
Leadership research has mostly concentrated on people who run teams: coaches, junior officers or managers of operating units.
It is within teams and working groups that most of an organisation's activity actually gets done. At this first level of the hierarchy, successful leadership depends on the ability to build good relationships with each team member, one by one.
It is nonetheless useful to distinguish three levels of leadership, each with its own specific demands.
The first level: building high-performing teams.
Here, leadership means putting together, developing and sustaining teams that can deliver a high level of performance over time.
The second level: linking strategy and execution.
This level corresponds to middle management. Its role is to help several teams understand and implement the decisions taken by senior leadership.
At this level, the essential competence is diplomacy: knowing how to mediate between what top management requires and the pushback voiced by staff.
The third level: deciding and setting the direction.
At the top of the organisation, leadership is above all about making decisions and defining goals: working out what needs to be done and choosing whom to put in charge of it.
Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, a hugely successful technology company, was also known for being a particularly difficult person to be around.
Much the same could be said of Bill Gates at Microsoft, Jeff Bezos at Amazon and Elon Musk at SpaceX, not to mention Henry Ford, J. D. Rockefeller or Thomas Edison.
The "Apple paradox" therefore raises a question: how did people with such disagreeable characters manage to build such prosperous companies?
The answer the authors put forward is that exceptionally successful entrepreneurs are not necessarily better leaders than their rivals. What they do, however, is make better decisions on a consistent basis.
Decisions taken at the top of organisations carry enormous consequences. Some people are more capable than others at this task, which is why the question deserves close examination.
Drawing on their reading of military and economic history, as well as their own experience of working life, Robert Hogan and Adrian Furnham identify four dimensions that come up again and again in decision processes.
There are surely many more dimensions, but these four seem to them especially important and worth studying in greater depth:
Mike Tyson, the former world heavyweight boxing champion, made an observation that has since become famous:
"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face."
And yet Napoleon Bonaparte, perhaps the most victorious general in history, and Dwight Eisenhower were both renowned for their planning skills.
Eisenhower in fact declared:
"Plans are nothing; planning is everything."
Most people sit somewhere along a continuum that runs from planning to spontaneity.
Aesop's fable The Ant and the Grasshopper is often read as a picture of the difference between artists, who live in the moment, and farmers, who get ready for winter.
Yet Henry James, regarded as one of the greatest American novelists, planned his career like a military campaign.
So the real distinction is not between artists and farmers, but between people who achieve differing degrees of success.
The key idea is that ways of deciding can be arranged along an axis running from a methodical, planned approach at one end to an approach driven by the pursuit of a dream at the other.
Some people base their decisions on weighing up the potential gains, while others above all try to keep their losses to a minimum.
One might be tempted to see the pursuit of rewards as optimism and the avoidance of losses as pessimism. That, however, would be a mistake.
Reward seeking can, for instance, go hand in hand with the fear of missing out on an opportunity, known by the acronym FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).
Conversely, loss avoidance can reflect a form of prudence: the wish not to make needless mistakes.
Moreover, since 50% of business decisions are reckoned to be wrong, according to the estimate the authors adopt, both tendencies can be considered equally legitimate.
This line of thought brings to mind the speech Pericles gave in the midst of the Peloponnesian War:
"I am less concerned with the strategy of the Spartans than with our own mistakes."
In the same way, game theory suggests that when you find yourself in a position of weakness, as Pericles did, the best strategy is to avoid making mistakes.
The authors nevertheless assume that there are stable individual differences in the inclination to pursue rewards or to avoid losses.
When Ronald Reagan was asked what policy he would adopt towards the Russians, his answer was simple:
"It's simple: we win and they lose."
Three quotations, attributed respectively to a great statesman, to one of the earliest voices of American nonconformist thought and to one of the last universal geniuses of Western civilisation, capture the debate between intuition and factual evidence in decision making.
Otto von Bismarck:
"Only a fool learns from his own experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others."
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
"Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason."
David Hume:
"Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions."
Bismarck saw expertise as the most fitting guide for making decisions.
Emerson put his faith in intuition.
As for the subtle David Hume, he took a middle position: reason is an indispensable guide, but it is passion that supplies the real impetus that leads to action.
Which of these approaches is best?
History offers no definitive answer, so unpredictable are the outcomes of decisions taken in the real world.
George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States, was known for "going with his gut". That confidence led him, in the authors' view, into a disastrous and inconclusive war in Iraq.
Conversely, John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, turned to the finest experts available in the American armed forces, the CIA and the State Department before launching an invasion of Cuba that ended in failure.
He later remarked, with regret, that he had always known it was wiser to be wary of expert advice.
The key idea is that people differ along a decision-making continuum.
At one end are those who rely on intuition and instinct. At the other are those who favour facts, logic and expert opinion.
The first approach is associated with impulsiveness and flexibility.
The second can lead to a form of paralysis by analysis.
Saul Rosenzweig, a psychoanalyst whose work in the 1950s focused on how people respond to failure, suggested sorting responses into three broad categories.
Intropunitive reactions: blaming oneself.
Intropunitive people tend to hold themselves personally accountable for their bad decisions.
They can benefit from coaching and learn from their mistakes. They may, however, also feel excessive guilt and take longer to make decisions.
Extrapunitive reactions: blaming others.
Extrapunitive people put their bad decisions down to outside factors or other people.
They can be arrogant and struggle to learn from experience. On the other hand, they usually decide quickly and with confidence.
Impunitive reactions: acknowledging the mistake without dwelling on it.
Impunitive people do not react much to having made a mistake.
Like elite athletes, they simply note the error and get straight back into action.
They neither complain nor try to justify themselves; they just carry on.
Each of these three tendencies therefore has its own strengths and limits.
Personality inevitably influences decision making.
Working out how, and to what extent, it does so is a particularly interesting field of research.
Everyone knows from experience an extraverted, impulsive person who makes hasty decisions with no real forethought.
Likewise, everyone has come across an anxious person, low on the Adjustment scale, who seems unable to make even the simplest decisions.
But Robert Hogan and Adrian Furnham have long been interested in another aspect of personality: its dark side and the way it shapes decision behaviour.
Here the authors put forward several hypotheses about the possible links between personality tendencies and decision styles.
More precisely, they suggest that people with high scores on certain scales of the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) respond in characteristic ways when they receive feedback telling them they have made mistakes.
The following eleven tendencies illustrate these possible responses.
Driven by a sense of urgency and constantly on the lookout for potential threats, people with high scores on the Excitable scale tend to leap to conclusions.
They make hurried decisions whose main purpose is to make problems disappear.
When faced with their mistakes, they push responsibility outwards in a scattered way, pointing to every cause within reach: unsuitable rules, insubordinate staff or other external factors.
Worried that they might be criticised for their mistakes, people with high scores on the Cautious scale show a strong aversion to risk.
As a result, they make their decisions slowly, sometimes even reluctantly.
Their choices aim at keeping potential costs down rather than at maximising benefits.
When faced with a mistake, they become even more careful and grow more hesitant still about making new decisions.
Especially alert to signs of threat and betrayal, people with high scores on the Skeptical scale make decisions designed to shield them from would-be aggressors.
Their decisions may also be meant to send a deterrent message to those they regard as a threat.
When a mistake occurs, they lay the blame on their enemies, whether real or imagined.
People with high scores on the Reserved scale base their decisions solely on business or financial considerations.
They give little thought to how their choices affect people or team morale.
When faced with a mistake, they take the feedback as a personal attack.
They nevertheless hold back their anger, withdraw and disregard the comments directed at them.
People with high scores on the Leisurely scale often feel that constraints are being forced on them and find it hard to put up with being told what to do.
They therefore make decisions that allow them to escape being held accountable should things go wrong.
When a mistake is pointed out, they hold responsible the person who asked them to act, usually a line manager.
They then refuse to accept any personal responsibility.
People with high scores on the Bold scale tend to overrate their abilities and underrate the difficulties they may run into.
They make risky decisions intended to boost their status and prestige.
When they make a mistake, they try to put a favourable spin on the facts and refuse to admit the error or take responsibility for it.
Focused on their own goals and convinced that others will always end up forgiving them, people with high scores on the Mischievous scale make decisions that lead them to cut corners, push boundaries or even openly flout the rules.
When confronted with a mistake, they refuse to own up to it.
Using quasi-legal reasoning and considerable verbal agility, they try to deny any responsibility.
Convinced that others find them fascinating and attractive, people with high scores on the Colorful scale make decisions designed to attract attention and stir up interest around themselves.
When they make mistakes, they simply refuse to acknowledge that the mistakes exist.
They expect others to accept their errors as an integral part of their charm.
People with high scores on the Imaginative scale are convinced that their unusual, creative and unconventional ideas captivate those around them.
They make decisions meant more to surprise and entertain others than to solve problems in practice.
When faced with their mistakes, they are puzzled that others fail to understand them.
They then try to justify their decisions with explanations that nobody can really follow.
People with high scores on the Diligent scale are serious, concrete and pragmatic.
They make decisions geared towards precise, short-term solutions, but tend to lose sight of the bigger picture.
When they make a mistake, they feel guilty and blame themselves.
They then redouble their efforts and focus even more closely on the details.
People with high scores on the Dutiful scale care a great deal about appearing loyal.
They therefore make the decisions they believe will please authority figures, rather than those genuinely suited to solving the problem at hand.
When a mistake occurs, they feel guilty and take the blame on themselves.
They then work even harder to meet the expectations of those in authority.
In every field, high-performing leaders stand out in particular for their ability to make sounder decisions.
This competence can be learned and developed, but it remains strongly influenced by personality.
The analysis offered by Robert Hogan and Adrian Furnham shows how far the dark side of personality can mould decision styles, notably in situations of pressure, uncertainty or failure.
That is why the authors recommend assessing people's personality carefully before appointing or promoting them to leadership roles.
For organisations, this perspective opens up important avenues of thought for HR strategy and Talent Management.
Personality assessment, notably through the Hogan inventories, makes it possible to look beyond technical skills or professional experience. It helps clarify the behavioural tendencies likely to affect judgement, risk management, relationships with others and reactions to difficulty.
Building these dimensions into assessment and development, coaching and leadership support can help identify the risks of behavioural derailment, strengthen self-awareness and develop more balanced decision practices.
The challenge is not merely to select leaders who can make decisions, but to develop leaders who understand their own decision mechanisms, learn from their mistakes and act with discernment.
This approach is an essential lever for developing leadership potential, supporting team transformation and building lasting organisational performance.
The 11 derailers series: Excitable · Skeptical · Cautious · Reserved (coming soon) · Leisurely · Bold · Mischievous · Colorful · Imaginative · Diligent · Dutiful
At Authentic Talent, we believe that objective assessment of talent and potential within organisations is a decisive factor in their future success. If you would like to discuss it with us, let's talk!
This article is adapted from “The Psychology of Decision Making” by Robert Hogan (Hogan Assessments) and Adrian Furnham (BI Norwegian Business School), published in The European Business Review, September-October 2026.
