Recently, Profiles International conducted a survey entitled, “How to Manage Jerks, Prima Donnas, Divas, and Hotheads.” This survey addresses an important issue facing many organizations who manage difficult high performers.
In today’s economy, companies feel the pressure to hire and retain top-performing employees regardless of their personality. We found in our study that most of these high performers tend to come with difficult personalities. While these employees may increase productivity and efficiency, we sought to find whether the added cost of managing these difficult employees outweighs their benefits.
Given the importance of learning how to work with difficult employees, our study had three objectives:
- Identify the prevalence of difficult high performers in the workplace and how they can influence an organization.
- Uncover the sources of challenges companies face when managing difficult high performers.
- Understand how an organization copes with high-performing employees who have difficult personalities.