Psychogeek

Will being a jerk help your career?

Even with just a moment’s reflection, it’s easy to think of an individual in power as a person with a selfish, combative, and manipulative personalities - whether in business, politics, academia, or the arts. Seeing a disagreeable person in power prompts a question that is profoundly important and yet that has received insufficient empirical attention:
Are disagreeable individuals more likely to attain power than agreeable individuals?

This question is important because highly disagreeable individuals in positions of power can do a lot of damage. For example, CEOs who are nasty and bullying create cultures of abuse and tend to lead their organizations to fail.

Disagreeable people who are powerful (and, thus, visible) can have toxic far-reaching effects and can also serve as antisocial role models and encourage others to behave more disagreeably. When people see a disagreeable person in power, they might conclude that being disagreeable will help them attain power and, in turn, behave more disagreeably. If such a belief is inaccurate, it is important to empirically dispel this myth.
Power is a fundamental principle that organizes relationships within virtually all social-living species. It is defined as the capacity to influence others by providing or withholding resources or administering punishments. Power differences provide a heuristic for how resources, prerequisites, and control are allocated.

A new research of Professor Cameron Anderson of the University of California, Berkeley, conducted personality assessments of thousands of undergraduate and MBA students at three American universities, which throws doubt on this, indicating unpleasant people are no more likely to make a quick rise up the corporate ladder. An average of 14 years later 671 of these agreed to follow up interviews that were used to estimate how powerful their current job was, and the culture of the organization where they worked. Almost a third of participants were part of a study that asked more detailed questions and confirmed findings with interviews of coworkers.

Two preregistered prospective longitudinal studies found a null relationship between disagreeableness and power. Disagreeable individuals, who behave in aggressive, selfish, and manipulative ways, did not attain more power than agreeable individuals over time. In contrast, both studies found a consistent and robust relation-ship between extraversion and power.
The null correlation they observed indicates that organizations place disagreeable individuals in powerful positions at the same rate they do agreeable individuals. Nasty individuals reach the top just as often as nice individuals.

On the other hand, it doesn't seem to hurt either. For instance, Anderson and co-authors findings suggest that being disagreeable did not help those individuals gain their powerful position. Instead, their problematic behavior might be a product of occupying a powerful position. In other words, while the possession of power can foster disagreeable behavior, disagreeable behavior does not appear to help people gain power.

The results of their studies supported the compensatory hypothesis they had. Disagreeable individuals did not attain higher power because they engaged in two different patterns of behavior that offset each other’s effects. They engaged in dominant-aggressive behavior, which predicted higher power, but also engaged in fewer communal behaviors, which predicted lower power. These two effects, when combined, canceled each other out and led to an overall null correlation between disagreeableness and power.

The traits that predicted career success were unsurprising. People described as extroverted, assertive, energetic, and sociable by their classmates were more likely to end up in positions of power.

So if people in powerful positions are not intrinsically nastier than the rest of us, why do we suspect otherwise? One possibility is that it is purely perception; a person with a typical mix of decency and selfishness will seem cruel simply by virtue of the harm their decisions can cause to those below. On the other hand, the authors acknowledge, it is possible that acquiring power changes enough of us that the perception is true, but only because ordinary people have been twisted by their jobs.