How personality affects public sector performance: GLF Ali Hasanain publishes working paper

Do certain personality traits make public sector workers better at their jobs? In a recently published working paper, Global Leaders Fellow Ali Hasanain and his four co-authors provide evidence from experiments in Punjab, Pakistan that shows doctors with particular personality types attended work more and falsified inspection reports less.

The paper identifies three ways that considering workers’ personality could be used to improve the quality of public services: hiring processes could select for relevant psychological traits, efforts at improving service delivery could target workers’ attitudes and outlooks, and personality tests could be used in hiring and promotion decisions.

To learn more, read the working paper.