Selfishness and narcissism are such horrible characteristics that it’s nice to think that they aren’t at all beneficial to our careers. Yet there remains a nagging feeling that the leadership ranks are full of dog-eat-dog narcissists that would sell their grandmother to get ahead.
New research from Berkeley Haas set out to explore whether that was really the case. The researchers tracked individuals with selfish, combative, and manipulative personalities from college on into their careers over a 14-year period to see how their lives unfolded.
The results were consistent, as regardless of the individual involved, or the context, being disagreeable did not give them any kind of professional advantage, even when they worked in particularly competitive and cutthroat environments.
Looking out for number one
The study consisted of two parts, both of which contained volunteers who had undergone personality assessment tests as either MBA students or undergraduates. Those same people were then surveyed again ten years later to understand their career progression, and particularly where they sat within their organization’s hierarchy.
The researchers also quizzed the colleagues of the volunteers to gain an insight into their behavior at work. The analysis produced a clear outcome, with those people scoring highly on disagreeable character traits doing significantly worse than those displaying generosity and trustworthiness.
The authors suggest that any power boost received by selfish people is offset by the poorer relationships they have at work. This also explained in part why extroverts appeared to have done best out of the cohort, as their sociability, energy, and assertiveness helped them to thrive professionally.
“The bad news here is that organizations do place disagreeable individuals in charge just as often as agreeable people,” the researchers explain. “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.”
Secrets to success
The researchers accept that there is no shortage of jerks in positions of power, and while research from the University of Illinois suggests that a bit of narcissism is required to be a leader, the Berkeley team wanted to find out how useful disagreeableness really is in our climb up the greasy pole. In other words, is it the narcissism that gets us to the top, or is it purely incidental?
All of the participants in the research complete the Big Five Inventory (BFI), which examines people according to the big five personality traits of openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism and agreeableness. Some of the volunteers then filled in a second personality assessment, called the NEO Personality Inventory-Revised (NEO PI-R).
“Disagreeableness is a relatively stable aspect of personality that involves the tendency to behave in quarrelsome, cold, callous and selfish ways,” the researchers explain. “…Disagreeable people tend to be hostile and abusive to others, deceive and manipulate others for their own gain and ignore others’ concerns or welfare.”
As such, while the selfish people did tend to engage in dominant behavior at work, their lack of communal behavior cancelled out their dominance, and left them worse off.
“Having a strong set of alliances is generally important to power in all areas of life,” the researchers conclude. “Disagreeable politicians might have more difficulty maintaining necessary alliances because of their toxic behavior.”
