Then he attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC) scholarship, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude in 1960.

Hogan was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship but was unable to accept it due to his marriage and military enlistment.

Then, from 1963 to 1964, he worked as a probation officer in San Bernardino County, California, before deciding to pursue additional education.

His experiences in the criminal justice system[4] and the military created a lifetime interest in moral development and leadership, the topics that form the bulk of his scholarly work.

At Berkeley, he met many of the great personality psychologists of the WWII generation: Hans Eysenck, Raymond Cattell, Henry Murray, John Bowlby, Jack Block, Donald MacKinnon, Frank Barron, Harrison Gough, and John Holland.

Hogan joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins University in 1967, where he became professor of psychology and social relations.

Hogan's socioanalytic theory is the foundation for his eponymous personality inventories and has been studied extensively in relation to job performance and promotion criteria.

Although most people need acceptance and approval, status and power, and structure and meaning, huge individual differences exist in their ability to acquire these resources.

Hogan makes six key points to this effect: First, social interaction involves the exchange of goods (affection, money, etc.)

People can pursue self-knowledge through various self-discovery processes, but Hogan, drawing from Freud, argues that identity is always merely made up.

Because warfare is a human universal, Hogan defines leadership as the ability to build and maintain a team that can outperform its competition—and therefore survive.

In the modern business world, most discussions define leadership in terms of the people at the tops of organizations.

Citing data on the base rate of managerial incompetence in public and private sector organizations (65% to 75%),[16] Hogan suggests it is a mistake to define leadership in terms of the people in charge.

Building on his distinction between identity and reputation, Hogan developed a socioanalytic perspective on job performance.

According to Hogan, rewardingness—being interesting and agreeable, meeting the other person’s expectations, satisfying their desires, and promoting their agenda—forms the basis for performance appraisal.

Well-constructed measures of personality predict appropriately matched elements of job performance.

Following Gordon Allport, many modern psychologists define personality in terms of traits: enduring neuropsychic structures that shape individual thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in characteristic ways.

Hogan’s research on personality and job performance began in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In the years leading up to the Civil Rights Act and the subsequent formation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1973, psychologists favored measures of cognitive ability as the best predictor of occupational performance—even though cognitive ability measures discriminated against minority groups in employment selection.

Hogan and his colleagues pioneered the use of personality measures to promote equity and fairness in personnel selection.

His book Personality and the Fate of Organizations was published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates in June 2006.