And there are a lot of books on how to deal with these people.
Which book would you recommend or has helped you to deal with these people?
First you have to understand what agreeability is according to the psychological 5 factor model. It’s not charisma, as most people might believe, which is linked to extroversion. Agreeability is liked to compassion and empathy. People high in agreeability want to please other people and struggle to identify selfish desires. People low in agreeability know exactly what they want and have no problem telling it to you others be damned.
Military culture stresses high agreeability but the internal stresses of the work impose low agreeability environments. The result is brutal honesty. When I say brutal I mean absolutely savage where there is absolutely no regard for your emotions or face-saving nonsense in interpersonal communications sometimes even in large groups. Military cultures tend to be extremely confrontational, which is something that must be learned for people with high agreeability personalities. Despite that military cultures stress a nurturing high growth environment at multiple levels all the time. It’s completely alien until you experience it, and it’s mostly cross cultural around the world.
Corporate cultures, on the other hand, stress niceness, because they have to. People get offended. That limits how you address people and thus what you can tell them. As a result people keep a lot to themselves, which unintentionally and significantly limits honesty. This leaves people to figure out conduct on their own, which can really be sink or drown and most people will often never see it. In software it’s extremely exaggerated because most people in software fear confrontation.
As for brutal honesty one of the best books I have read is And They Were Not Ashamed. It’s a book about improving marriages through brutal honesty and increased sexual intimacy. The brutal honesty part can apply directly to professional relationships.
Something I can totally agree with.
But other books I’ve read recently that are specific to work which may help were:
Organisational Behaviour. 6th Edition, by McShane, Olekalns, Newman, & Martin.
Group Dynamics for teams. 5th edition. By Daniel Levi.
I also have a heap of really interesting readings on dark triad personality traits in the workplace...
Hogan, J., Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R. B. (2011). Management derailment. In S. Zedeck (Ed.), APA Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (vol. 3, pp. 555–575). American Psychological Association.
Tourish, D. (2018). Dysfunctional leadership in corporations. In P. Garrard (Ed.), The Leadership hubris epidemic: Biological roots and strategies for prevention (pp. 137–162). Palgrave Macmillan.
Tourish, D. (2013). The dark side of transformational leadership: A critical perspective. Routledge.
Chapter 3: Coercive persuasion, power and corporate cults Alvesson, M., & Blom, M. (2019). Beyond leadership and followership: Working with a variety of modes of organizing. Organizational Dynamics, 48(1), 28–37.