The evidence is in: Nice guys and gals don’t finish last, and being a greedy jerk doesn’t get you ahead.
That is the clear conclusion from study that monitored unpleasant individuals from college or grad school to where they landed in their careers about 14 years after.
“I was surprised by the consistency of the findings. No matter the individual or the context, disagreeableness did not give people an advantage in the competition for power–even in more cutthroat, ‘dog-eat-dog’ organizational cultures,” said Berkeley Haas Prof. Cameron Anderson.
The researchers conducted two studies of people who had completed their education. They surveyed the same people more than a decade later, inquiring about their power and rank within their workplaces, as well as the culture of the organizations. They also requested their co-workers to rate the study participants’ rank and workplace behavior. Across the board, they found those with selfish, deceitful, and aggressive character traits weren’t more likely to have attained status than those who had been more generous, reliable, and usually nice.
That’s not to say that jerks don’t reach positions of power. It is Just that they did not get ahead quicker than other people, and also being a jerk simply didn’t help, Anderson said. That’s because any energy increase they get from being debilitating is offset by their poor social relationships, the researchers discovered.
“The bad news here is that organizations do place disagreeable individuals in charge just as often as agreeable people,” Anderson stated. “In other words, they allow jerks to gain power at the same rate as anyone else, even though jerks in power can do serious damage to the organization.”
The age-old issue of if being aggressively Machiavellian helps people get ahead has interested Anderson, who studies social standing. It is a critical question for managers, since ample studies have shown that jerks in positions of power are violent, prioritize their particular self-interest, create corrupt cultures, and finally induce their associations to fail.
People might think, “Perhaps if I become a much bigger asshole I will be successful like Steve Jobs,” the authors note in their paper. “My advice to managers would be to pay attention to agreeableness as an important qualification for positions of power and leadership” Anderson stated. “”Disagreeableness is a relatively stable aspect of personality that involves the tendency to behave in quarrelsome, cold, callous, and selfish ways,” the researchers explained. “…Disagreeable people tend to be hostile and abusive to others, deceive and manipulate others for their own gain, and ignore others’ concerns or welfare.” Prior research is clear: agreeable people in power produce better outcomes.”
While there is clearly no shortage of jerks in power, there’s been little empirical research to settle the question of if being disagreeable actually helped them get there, or is only incidental to their achievement. Anderson and his co-authors set out to make a research design that will clear up the argument.
What defines a jerk? The participants had completed the Big Five Inventory (BFI), an assessment based on general consensus among psychologists of the five basic personality dimensions: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness. It was created by Anderson’s co-author John, who directs the Berkeley Personality Lab. In addition, some of the participants completed a second personality evaluation, the NEO Personality Inventory-Revised (NEO PI-R).
“Disagreeableness is a relatively secure aspect of personality That involves the tendency to behave in quarrelsome, cold, callous, and selfish ways,” the investigators explained.” . . .Disagreeable people are usually aggressive and abusive to other people, deceive and manipulate others for their own profit, and dismiss others’ welfare or concerns.”
In the initial study, which entailed 457 participants, that the Researchers found no connection between power and disagreeableness, whether or not the person had scored high or low on those traits. That was true irrespective of gender, race or ethnicity, business, or the cultural standards from the organization.
The next research went deeper, taking a look at the four main ways people today attain power: through dominant-aggressive behavior, or with fear and intimidation; political behavior, or building alliances with influential people; communal behavior, or assisting others; and capable behavior, or being good at one’s job. They also asked the subjects’ co-workers to accelerate their location in the hierarchy, as well as their office behavior (interestingly, the co-workers’ ratings mainly matched the subjects’ self-assessments).
This allowed the investigators to understand why disagreeable individuals don’t get ahead quicker than others. Though jerks tend to engage in dominant behavior, their lack of communal behavior cancels out any benefit their aggressiveness provides them, they reasoned.
Anderson noted that the findings do not directly speak to whether disagreeableness helps or hurts individuals attain power in the domain of electoral politics, in which the power dynamics are different than in organizations. However, there are some likely parallels. “Having a strong set of alliances is generally important to power in all areas of life,” he said. “Disagreeable politicians might have more difficulty maintaining necessary alliances because of their toxic behavior.”