A 14 year longitudinal study found that being disagreeable—aggressive, selfish, manipulative, and so on—does not have a positive relationship with obtaining power at work. Researchers found “dominant aggressive behavior”, which is a predictor of power, was offset by engaging in less communal and generous behavior, canceled each other out.
This is reassuring for companies with a ‘no assholes’ rule. People can obtain power in these organizations while mediating the negative impact of disagreeable behaviors.
Read the paper: People with disagreeable personalities (selfish, combative, and manipulative) do not have an advantage in pursuing power at work.
See also:
- Imitating high-status people doesn’t work—they can obtain power and become disagreeable later and this study shows it didn’t help them obtain power in the first place
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Alpha Males Only Exist in Captivity
The theory popularized by the book The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species, published in 1970, has long since been debunked. Turns out, the observation that there was a strict pecking order to the pack that governed all behavior was because the researchers were working with wolves in captivity. Essentially, the alpha male things doesn’t happen in the wild and it’s like observing prison rules for wolves.