Executive Onboarding

Executive Onboarding
It is our experience that particularly when it comes to
international headquartered companies with strong employer
brands, cognitive abilities such as intelligence seem to be very
highly prioritized. However, the extreme focus on intelligence
sometimes backfires. A recent example is Nokia. A few years
ago, Nokia boasted a very strong employer brand and were able
to attract and retain highly intelligent R&D people in
Copenhagen. Over the span of a decade, the company employed
hundreds of the most intelligent R&D individuals that Denmark
could muster. Unfortunately, with all these intelligent people
gathered in one place, things seemed to become more and more
intellectualized and theoretizised and less and less concrete,
practical, productive and action-oriented. Many layers of
bureaucratic work processes seemed to take over, creating
decision vacuums and affecting overall performance negatively.
6. Personality
The predictive validity between personality and job
performance has been a frequently studied topic in industrial
psychology over the years (Rothmann, S. & Coetzer, 2003).
From an overall perspective, research indicates that the
predictive validity between personality and future
performance ranges at approximately 0,30 (Kinley & Ben-Hur,
2013). This implies that personality is a good (acceptable)
predictor, however, far from the levels seen with e.g. the
cognitive ability of intelligence. Alternatively, unlike many
measures of cognitive ability, personality measures typically do
not have an adverse effect on disadvantaged employees, and
thus, can enhance fairness in personnel decisions (Hogan,
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