People with disagreeable personalities (selfish, combative, and manipulative) do not have an advantage in pursuing power at work

People with disagreeable personalities (selfish, combative, and manipulative) do not have an advantage in pursuing power at work. Cameron Anderson, Daron L. Sharps, Christopher J. Soto, and Oliver P. John. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 31, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2005088117

Significance: 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. In two longitudinal prospective studies, we found that disagreeableness did not predict the attainment of power. Selfish, deceitful, and aggressive individuals were no more likely to attain power than were generous, trustworthy, and nice individuals. Why not? Disagreeable individuals were intimidating, which would have elevated their power, but they also had poorer interpersonal relationships at work, which offset any possible power advantage their behavior might have provided.

Abstract: Does being disagreeable—that is, behaving in aggressive, selfish, and manipulative ways—help people attain power? This question has long captivated philosophers, scholars, and laypeople alike, and yet prior empirical findings have been inconclusive. In the current research, we conducted two preregistered prospective longitudinal studies in which we measured participants’ disagreeableness prior to entering the labor market and then assessed the power they attained in the context of their work organization ∼14 y later when their professional careers had unfolded. Both studies found disagreeable individuals did not attain higher power as opposed to extraverted individuals who did gain higher power in their organizations. Furthermore, the null relationship between disagreeableness and power was not moderated by individual differences, such as gender or ethnicity, or by contextual variables, such as organizational culture. What can account for this null relationship? A close examination of behavior patterns in the workplace found that disagreeable individuals engaged in two distinct patterns of behavior that offset each other’s effects on power attainment: They engaged in more dominant-aggressive behavior, which positively predicted attaining higher power, but also engaged in less communal and generous behavior, which predicted attaining less power. These two effects, when combined, appeared to cancel each other out and led to a null correlation between disagreeableness and power.

Keywords: disagreeablenesspowerextraversionhierarchy