Empirical Evidence that Nice People Don’t Always Finish Last
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
Empirical evidence that nice people don't always finish last:
Think your boss is a jerk? Wonder why the management of your organization consists of sociopaths? Some academic researchers suspect you're not alone, and they start their new paper with the statement, "We suffer no shortage of jerks in power." And they go on to ask the obvious question raised by this fact: "Does being a jerk help people attain power?"
To find out, the researchers set up a very long-term experiment. After administering personality surveys to undergrad and MBA students, they waited over a decade to follow up and find out which personality types had accrued power in the world of employment. The results suggest that jerks don't necessarily get ahead at work; instead, some of the consequences of being unpleasant offset the benefits that it might otherwise provide.
[...] The good news here is that, as the researchers put it, "individuals who were more selfish, combative, and deceitful did not, subsequently, attain higher power." So, nice people do not necessarily finish last. But, at the same time, nobody seems to be held back by displaying that list of behaviors on the job.
Journal Reference:
Cameron Anderson, Daron L. Sharps, Christopher J. Soto, et al. People with disagreeable personalities (selfish, combative, and manipulative) do not have an advantage in pursuing power at work [$], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2005088117)
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