Disagreeable personalities do not have an advantage in power at work (2020)
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
In my personal experience (which is limited) there's a certain constellation of organizational characteristics that leads to disagreeable individuals attaining power, and organizational "combativeness" isn't really it. I think "corruption" is closer, and good luck measuring that with a self report survey.
Then again, maybe the relevant issue isn't whether or not people who are jerks are more likely to attain power, it's than once they're there they're more likely to cause problems, and they're not less likely to attain power. So then them being in power is salient.
But then I think you have to ask, why aren't they less likely to attain power? Is this a case where a zero correlation is actually masking some mixture of processes, one positive in direction and the other negative? If so you'd think that certain settings would inhibit one or the other of those processes.
I guess I feel like this is a case where studying normative organizational dynamics in a cursory way could end up being really misleading.
As maybe an interesting business example, Elon has begun to shed the calm outward composure more and more over the last 5 years and has lost more wealth than anyone in history at the same time. Maybe that is coincidental but one wonders.
These are the type of people we’ve chosen to reward in society and unfortunately most people have drunk the kool-aid and have been convinced that these people deserve to be rewarded. And even further, they think society can’t function unless we reward these people!
It's not a conscious choice. And it's not a choice with even odds against the alternative. It's choice with more benefits than deficits.
Historically (back to the very beginning of us as social animals) these are the type of people that quickly and surely make high risk and high reward decisions. And those are the types of decisions that determine life or death, feast or famine, in the wild.
However, that said, it is very difficult in my experience to make correct decisions for a large organization if you prioritize personal relationships. Often, we define that behavior as corruption.
I think the future of ev psych is more in the bottom-up: what the evolutionary sub modules are and how do they articulate with each other to produce aspects of awareness/behavior — the stuff the Salk Institute is doing with using ML/AI to understand cognition, for example.
I was thinking game theory, from the prisoners dilemma complex as a first principal.
And the whole thing as a cocktail napkin guess. I'm not a scientist nor do I have decades and millions of human monies to run proper tests.
I was trying to give a little wide grounding to the "we choose" token which sounded to me like the difference between choosing pants for the day or a type of beer. It's not arbitrary, low cost, novel, or small scale.
Which circle you exist in, determines if that person is 'agreeable' or 'disagreeable'. The workplace is no different.
Seriously tho, there seems to be a difference between people who are trying to sell you/force their POV and straight up contrarians who will always take an adversarial position for kicks.
The former _can_, at least be productive, the latter is just a roadblock.
You don't have to be a jerk to get ahead. And being a jerk won't get you ahead. What you need is to not care if you look like a jerk.
Sometimes you'll feel you're right so strongly that you'll just not care if people disagree with you. And when you will not budge on an item at all, people are going to think of you as a bit of a jerk.
For example, if someone prioritizes their interests before another's, are they a jerk? The distinction depends on whichever construct you've subscribed to.
IMO a better way to think of it is that someone needs to be a jerk to get ahead. The three things we're accusing people of in this topic (being selfish, combative, and manipulative) are the three things that all companies do all the time. We want to launder that, I think.
Note that I did not say morally / ethically prudent, self actualized, or not prone to being a shithead at times. Just that they tend not to be disagreeable.
Every problem that tech has comes from treating disagreeable people as pariahs. Organizational bloat and tech debt are still issues even when we're not there. Avoid hiring disagreeable people and you'll arrive at the stereotypical tech org that can't get anything done. If you don't have disagreeable people to solve your issues, you have to use the other tool: Layoffs.
Discriminating against people because they're disagreeable is insane. It's a Big Five personality trait. You hate half of humanity. Evolution produced the best problem-solving thing ever, humanity, and you decided a lot of the work done there was just pointless.
The real reason disagreeable people are valuable and can attain power in the workplace is because you've made it so with this completely unreasonable bias you have. They're not supposed to be extremely rare! That only happens in the tech workplace.
Would you similarly discriminate against anxious people? What about people who aren't open to new experiences? Do you shut them out too? How does your ideology square with black people being way more disagreeable on average? Let me guess: You don't hire any and then mumble something about culture fit.
Working with disagreeable people doesn't suck. Working sucks. The disagreeable people just point it out. How do you ever improve without that? Working at an all-agreeable-people tech firm is a Kafkaesque nightmare of everything being perfect and nothing getting done. And you all deserve it because you decided that when people tend to be one way or the other, the ones who are like you are just better.
I think that being the unpleasant version of “not a yes-man” just means that people will try to find ways around you.
You do, actually, have to be disagreeable to disagree. Agreeable people don't like to cause a fuss and just go along with stuff even if they disagree internally. Disagreeable people are the people who tend to disagree. That's all it means. Some of them are snarky assholes (you right now?), and others are just people who disagree.
"Disagreeable" in common parlance means difficult, overly-critical, and aggressive, but that's not what 's being said here.
It's not about "passive" vs "assertive" like you claim. Both of those can be agreeable!
[1] https://arc.psych.wisc.edu/self-report/big-five-inventory-bf...
Obviously disagreeable can agree or disagree, and they can do either well or badly (I happen to be very good at both, thanks). It doesn't change who they are while doing it. Just like someone who isn't open to new experiences doesn't experience a personality change while trying a new restaurant.
Disagreeable people do, as a group, have more unpleasant, cynical and snarky people. But that doesn't mean that all people in that group are that way. It's not fair for you to assign me these qualities and then argue against them when I'm talking about disagreeable people at large. Again, it's half the population so there's a wide spectrum of outcomes.
-1 for strawman
disagreeing with someone and raking high on Disagreeableness BigFive trait are two different things
So much of my time spent at work is in a state of frustration at processes and people. I think it's my job to be vocal about what I see, either to improve the situation, or correct my perspective (i.e. learn!).
However.. I have to sanitize my language and use the most gross of corporate speak. I often sleep on it before sending a contentious email. I'm still the team asshole, but an old boss said every team needs one ;)
I began my career at IBM, where the loudest, most aggressive person got to be in charge. I have a lot of experience working around disagreeable co-workers---usually by doing things their way, whether or not it is best for the project---because there's no other way to get anything done. But then, I don't consider constant bike-shedding arguments as getting things done.
Fortunately, I don't have to do that any more. I've quit jobs because I couldn't stand spending more of my time keeping a disagreeable person happy (well, not happy; they're never going to be happy) than getting my actual work done. (Oh, that co-worker from the first paragraph? A few years later he sent me an email asking if I would be a reference. I said no.)
On the other hand, I do think it's possible to assume this double burden, and the people who do it well can become the most valued people in an organization. Consider taking it as yet another problem that you can work on!
The hidden superpower of the "neurotic" and "disagreeable" is being sensitive to how things are not great, which helps give rise to the drive to improve. And that drive can and should be applied to our sometimes socially suboptimal ways of expressing ourselves. An "opportunity to improve" can be a lot more popular than a "way things suck", depending on who you're working with.
Disagreeable people often have an over-the-top people-pleaser side because they're bad at agreeability. For them it's usually a choice of being a doormat or a jerk.
When people are bad at agreeability in this way, but still agreeable, nobody is in a rush to correct them. Nobody threatens to quit over the doormat. But it's the exact same personality flaw, just expressed differently in Big Five terms.
Re: agreeability, it seems like you're speaking of it as a skill more than just a personality variable. I see the skill of being prosocial and the personality trait of agreeability as separate. I see myself as a high-functioning disagreeable person, where I see things more negatively than average and have more conflictual feelings than average, but usually manage to turn it all into something effective and prosocial when working with other people.
The "disgust" in your result (I have one too) is what's rare in tech and mostly what I'm talking about here. The Fixer is holding the entire industry together, from where I'm sitting, and the only archetype I ever 'click' with (I'm fear/disgust/pride, so we both have that instant inner critical voice). They are really good at the disgust -> prosocial process you mention. My archetype is... way worse at that.
Re: Skill. Yeah it's both, agreed. A role for virtue too.
Eerily, from so few questions, it got so many things things right about both me (The Wizard) and my wife (The Duelist).
> Working with disagreeable people doesn't suck
W00t! By definition it does.
> The disagreeable people just point it out
Ah, perhaps you mean disagree-ing people. That would make some sense at least.
Which, to me, sounds very different from voicing concerns or identifying problems.
This reeks of all-or-nothing thinking, which itself reeks of deep insecurity (a very likely root condition of being disagreeable).
It's one thing to have differing thoughts and opinions. It's another thing to be "disagreeable", which is the personality trait of being difficult to work with, often for the sake of being contrarian or having an ego trip (i.e, proving that you are right to showcase your power and value relative to others).
As others have stated, disagreeing is orthogonal to being disagreeable. One can disagree via constructive dialogue and open communication; however, taking disagreeableness as an identifying personality trait (and moreover, holding it as valuable in-and-of-itself) is a slippery slope to the creation of toxic working relationships.
You have the psychology wrong. That's not what the term disagreeable means in personality psychology.
> Would you similarly discriminate against anxious people?
As a bomb-disposal tech? Yes. As a cashier? No. Similarly, would I discriminate against a disagreeable person as a manager? Yes. As a solitary programmer? No.
The definition is literally in the title: "disagreeable personalities (selfish, combative, and manipulative)".
So, yes, by definition, disagreeable people are jerks. If that's you, then you, too, are a jerk.
That is completely orthogonal to "people who notice problems". If someone thinks that it's necessary to be "selfish, combative, and manipulative" in order to notice a problem, then that person is not only a jerk, but also deluding themselves that they're just misunderstood.
Ideas that aren't challenged suck. The same is true for people, at the individual and organizational level. I don't think believing this makes me a jerk.
Your comments such as "...as pariahs", "if you don't have disagreeable people to solve your issues, you have to use the other tool: Layoffs", "insane", and "hate" are exactly the sort of quarrelsome, manipulative statements that make working with someone 'disagreeable' so difficult. You aren't noticing problems; you're not pointing them out. What you are doing is demanding everyone else adapt to you, and you are using twisted emotional, disingenuous language to do it.
If were to make demands, it'd be in the form of helpful emotional advice: Hire so that at least 1 out of 6 people at your company are disagreeable. Don't ever allow agreeability silos, especially not around top executives. Never let a disagreeable person serve in a leadership role unless they have at least one disagreeable person working as a direct report.
It's not uncommon for big old professions and specialities to have institutes and charters which include compulsory precepts along the lines of "thou shalt not publicly disagree with or badmouth thy fellow".
There, agreeing-to-agree is foundationally baked in; the very professions are sustained around the continual churning out of cookie-cutter journeymen, with intergenerational progress carefully, hierarchically regulated such that the profession all steps forward together.
In my experience, if a company rewards disagreeable people who use shady tactics, politics, and power plays by giving them more power, it's not going to be a good place to work.
On the other hand, a culture that legitimately rewards people who play well together and reduces the influence of people who use politics and other games, there's a good chance it's going to be a good place to stay for many years.
I suspect a lot of people start their careers in the first type of company (rewards bad behavior) and assume it's totally normally. It's the only environment they know, so they assume all workplaces operate by the same rules. When you think all workplaces are equally bad, you start losing motivation to find a better culture at a different company. You might also start imitating some of the bad behavior that seems to be working out for other people. In a way, disagreeableness and office politics are contagious.
My advice to anyone who thinks that it's normal for companies to reward the "bad" employees at the expense of the "good" employees is that you might be at a company with backwards priorities. Consider prioritizing good peer references in your next job search to find a company that is better at these things. No workplace is perfect, but you don't want to work at a company that is consistently bad at reward alignment.
One can be a jerk without being disagreeable. Think of the classic smooth talking con artist.
'Opinionated' is a related word which does not mean exactly what it might seem from 'opinion'.
In academia, there is plenty of disagreement, mostly handled without being disagreeable.
Agreeableness in the five-factor model (Big Five) doesn't necessarily mean being overly compliant; it can also mean being trustful or altruistic (trust and altruism being two facets of agreeableness).
The study uses five-factor terminology with participants completing the Big Five Inventory (BFI) and some also completing the NEO-PI-R, so those are the definitions to keep in mind here.
On page 113 we find the following most associated with low-aggreableness:
> Fault-finding, cold, unfriendly, quarrelsome
And with high-aggre,
> Sympathetic, Kind, appreciative, affectionate
Now I do not read either as having to do with the picture of "selfish, combative, and manipulative".
I find the agreeable kind of manipulativeness, ie., the "Jerry-kind" (from Rick & Morty) just as egregious as the "Rick-kind".
What might equally be said of this study is that "agreeable methods of manipulation" are as effective as "disagreeable ones" in aggregate.
You have to average it over self-assessments and also the assessment of all your friends, family, and coworkers.
This study seems like common sense. Extroverted people who are agreeable climb the fastest.
People confuse disagreeable with “asshole”. Most assholes can be agreeable, just how they play the game is disagreeable. Political assholes take credit for others work and never take risk. Controlling assholes micromanage and suggest everything was their idea. Most disagreeable people hardly get promoted. It seems rather obvious that being liked tends to serve you well regardless of your expertise. Of course the Peter principle and Dilbert principle can kick in because of this.
Standing up for an idea or principle makes one disagreeable. An engineer who is just "going with the flow" is not bringing any expertise to the table.
To be clear, there are limits to how much and when one should stand-up for an idea or principle (i.e. pick your battles). Someone who fights every battle is, once again, entering asshole territory. But if being agreeable means picking no battles, then what are you even doing?
Usually other people's bidding
this sounds like another way of saying there is ever only one right way of doing something?
If on the other hand you believe that engineering is about tradeoffs, then being agreeable might be a willingness to work out what tradeoffs to make.
Either way, we are better off for it.
Mr. Rogers speaking to Congress.
I've seen this first hand. It's always smooth sailing politically to just go along with what the leader(s) say.
Which is why the study didn't ask "is this person disagreeable" of laypeople who happen to be their coworkers, but used psychological tests designed to measure the psychological version of the term over 14 years.
If you make everybody happy, you're a politician and you're not being effective in your role. With the caveat that many people don't fully understand their role within an organization. A given person is more likely to have been hired to go with the flow than to provide, say, technical rigor or sanity checks.
> [Disagreeable people] 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
The one thing I've observed disproportionately among sr execs: they're charismatic & collaborative right up until your interests diverge - and then they're ruthless. Some disagreeable personality traits _are_ actually important - they're just insufficient.
Think of Tom Brady - he's a charismatic guy, but if you're on his team and slack off, he'll get you cut without a second thought.
I don't see disagreeable people as more selfish, just less willing to compromise on what they think are bad ideas.
Combative? Not quite, we're talking disagreeability, not aggressiveness (a better word would just be disagreeable, but then you'd have no need to call us selfish and manipulative).
Manipulative? Go fuck yourself. Why would I try to trick you into doing what I want, when I can tell you that you're wrong and ignore you instead?
- upleasant or unenjoyable
- unfriendly and bad tempered
At least the first definition fits well with Jordan I believe. Maybe this is his guilty conscience trying to give meaning to the fact that he is fundamentally disagreeable?
General-purpose Oxford dictionaries are not the appropriate reference for a term from clinical psychology. Jordan uses the term "agreeableness", and, as its derivatives, adjectives "agreeable" and "disagreeable". If you consult psychology texts, e.g. Handbook of Personality Psychology [0], you will notice that what has been understood by it has varied: some interpreted it as conformity or compliance (which is more in line with the impression I got from Peterson), whereas others interpreted it as likeability or pleasantness, which is more in line with the title of the paper.
[0] - Its chapter on agreeableness is, luckily, available online at http://cachescan.bcub.ro/e-book/E1/580591/795-870.pdf
Here's where you're going wrong.
Facets of agreeableness include altruism and compliance, which are two very different things. Someone may be altruistic while also breaking the rules. Someone else may be compliant but stingy. But both could score high in agreeableness.
That said, I think historically disagreeable types had a bigger advantage because the world was simpler and a lot of times just having the courage of your convictions and appearing strong would be enough to rally people behind you. There's probably quite a bit of latent psychological tendencies in the populace that still allow that to work in some circumstances, but in the modern corporate world, especially tech, you'll get your lunch eaten if you can't get the best out of smart people.
Corollary: if the Good do tend to die younger, than they cannot rise to positions of power.
Happy 2023 =)
In organizations of sufficient size, if you run something important enough, everyone will have input - at the worst times.
No, I won't fundamentally change the design on a whim because of something you noticed.
I'll discuss it and work with you towards it, but I will not be strong-armed.
This has gone as far as me outright refusing to do things that reached executives -- being able to prevent them, because I/my team own the keys.
Perhaps because jealous and petty people are naturally inclined to have contempt for anybody with a higher status than them. By hiding behind platitudes like that, they can conceal the immature motives of their contempt and instead claim a moral high ground as an excuse for their failures.
That seems like the most obvious explanation to me at least.
But yeah, most people see themselves as good, and synonymize that with nice. All of our own flaws are minor, while other people's flaws are major.
Maybe when people see this, they assume that because a nice person would never do that, nice people can't get ahead. The truth is that the decision could be more complicated, with some people being helped, when others our damaged. It could be a straightforward decision that anybody in that position has to make.
It's a lot easier to just look at the bad and say nice guys finish last or that leaders must be jerks. The truth is more nuanced and is more like: "Leaders sometimes have to make decision that hurts some people, and will almost always (save for maybe the best of times) be hated by some"
> Perhaps because jealous and petty people are naturally inclined to have contempt for anybody with a higher status than them. By hiding behind platitudes like that, they can conceal the immature motives of their contempt
I have to ask: Are you in management or an executive? This sounds like the version these people would tell themselves to sleep at night. "They just hate me because they're jealous"
It's more that while management is important, many managers wind up being greedy and/or arrogant despite still being a small part of a big puzzle. They're privy to information that we aren't, get higher pay scales, and have an easier time protecting themselves and managing their careers, due to that position of privilege.
They get raised to a higher class and it goes to their head. For some extreme examples you can see the fall from grace of a number of billionaires Musk, Zuckerberg... I'd even add Marc Cuban. What do these people really do that's so special? That's been called into question lately. I appreciate that they took big risks and won, but that doesn't pertain to ongoing projects; in fact, it seems to just give people god complexes.
So it's more the entitlement, privilege, and how it goes to people's heads. Not "jealousy".
You seem to be suffering from the symptoms described in the sibling comment
> All of our own flaws are minor, while other people's flaws are major.
And of course it’s jealousy, and not just for the elite either. Most people hate to see anybody succeed.
I consider myself a gray area guy that's gotten exactly where they planned to, and doesn't really care about "getting ahead"... in many ways I'd rather not, as long as the checks keep clearing, and the pay is decent enough.
I've found that people who are disagreeable to management indeed might have trouble getting promoted and climb the corporate ladder, but at the same time they might be tremendously influential among their peers.
This is also a common effect that can be observed in anti-establishment/opposition structures, both in work-related (e.g leaders of trade unions) and political manners (e.g opposition parties). The leaders of said organizations can often be hugely influential within, but at the same considered highly disagreeable/assholes by the people on the other side.
> Let's take it a step further: agreeable people don't care about good engineering. They can't, by definition.
This! However, that generally leads to disagreeable engineers being very popular with their peers, and not so popular with management, unless the company is inherently engineer/dev focused.
So it's openly disagreeable personalities who have the disadvantage. I would think that successful manipulative (trait the study assigns to disagreeable) persons would engage in "communal and generous behavior" as tactic and generally hide their disagreeableness.
And even that doesn't help them?
I'm glad it's like that, it's just a bit off for me a bit.
Not only did I not get promoted, I got fired. AMA