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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: 4, Interesting) by krishnoid on Wednesday September 02 2020, @06:03PM (3 children)
I think hierarchically-minded institutions also don't tend to consider the network effects of those sorts of soft skills. If you encourage loyalty (i.e., from the upper ranks) as a perspective/behavior, your employees may sub/consciously experience that the environment encourages them to at least microdose loyalty amongst themselves. While loyalty to the company gets you measurable unpaid overtime and other stuff that shows up on a spreadsheet (or badge/door logs), loyalty to each other can improve productivity when worker A bee can do anything from get a cup of vitellogenin [wikipedia.org] (ok, I just now looked that up) from the breakroom for worker B bee, to having B notice and volunteer an extra five minutes to fix a problem that A's been struggling with for a couple hours.
Harder to quantify, but makes some problems just never appear on the radar, and it would seem that some good portion of a company's day-to-day operational efficiency has to be about in/visibly overcoming/circumventing obstacles.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday September 03 2020, @04:21PM (2 children)
Incorrect. All it takes is competition that does take advantage of all the values a company has access to and the shitty corp is out competed in the marketplace.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday September 03 2020, @07:22PM (1 child)
Modulo deep pockets and regulatory capture, yup.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday September 03 2020, @08:12PM
Nah, politicians are tools (pun absolutely intended) and can be purchased for either good or evil. Nothing stopping the "on the up and up" companies from purchasing a few dozen to deal with the realities of this our imperfect world.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.