SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the the-second-mouse-gets-the-cheese dept.
Empirical evidence that nice people don't always finish last:
Think your boss is a jerk? Wonder why the management of your organization consists of sociopaths? Some academic researchers suspect you're not alone, and they start their new paper with the statement, "We suffer no shortage of jerks in power." And they go on to ask the obvious question raised by this fact: "Does being a jerk help people attain power?"
To find out, the researchers set up a very long-term experiment. After administering personality surveys to undergrad and MBA students, they waited over a decade to follow up and find out which personality types had accrued power in the world of employment. The results suggest that jerks don't necessarily get ahead at work; instead, some of the consequences of being unpleasant offset the benefits that it might otherwise provide.
[...] The good news here is that, as the researchers put it, "individuals who were more selfish, combative, and deceitful did not, subsequently, attain higher power." So, nice people do not necessarily finish last. But, at the same time, nobody seems to be held back by displaying that list of behaviors on the job.
Journal Reference:
Cameron Anderson, Daron L. Sharps, Christopher J. Soto, et al. People with disagreeable personalities (selfish, combative, and manipulative) do not have an advantage in pursuing power at work [$], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2005088117)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2020, @06:19AM (7 children)
Being aggressive usually is what gets you ahead. That is correlated with being an asshole.
Not ALL people aggressive (assertive, climbers) in their jobs are assholes, but most seem to be.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2020, @06:33AM
I see a lot of guys who just fuking talk to fill empty space for 30 minutes until the meeting is over. That's a waste of everyone's time. That somehow gets equated with leadership and suddenly you have the loudest voice saying "Wash Your Hands, Everyone Needs To Wash Their Hands, Wear Gloves, Don't Cough OK? Don't Cough, And Wash Your Hands" for every fucking meeting thereafter.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Wednesday September 02 2020, @07:38AM
Even the medium term result depends [wikipedia.org] towards who you are aggressive against.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2020, @10:05AM
Not aggressive. Assertive. You need to be useful and assertive. Being an asshole may be assertive, but then you fail as a leader -- you need the non-assertive people to help you. Assholes tend to be less than useful in that role.
Assholes will be pigeon holed in any successful organization into roles where they can be useful. For example, an asshole that has a good repore with customers in sales may be a good asset for the company.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Bot on Wednesday September 02 2020, @12:50PM (3 children)
Back in the draft, all designed corporals (the ones nominated after three months) were of the asshole/dismissive kind. I understood why after being made corporal myself later, it saves a lot of time and drama with the assholes you gotta order around, because they fear you. With a non asshole strict guy, they evaluate more the risk/benefits of disobeying. With a non asshole non strict guy, they do whatever they want till everyone gets in trouble.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 02 2020, @07:26PM
Ah yes, we should model society after the military! /s
A terrible idea, and the reason why military hierarchy exists is because they have to prepare for when the orders are literally life and death situations. Makes sense why a fascist like yourself would fetishize that social structure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2020, @01:17AM (1 child)
This explains your commenting style!
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday September 04 2020, @10:16AM
Except here on SN, no matter the tones (you imbecile), there is no war, so discipline and hierarchies are irrelevant. In war, and in the current state of business ( post apocalyptic emerging social credit by the money printers), hierarchies and discipline are useful.
Account abandoned.