Disagreeable personalities do not have an advantage in power at work (2020)
This is interesting because it counters the idea that someone has to be a jerk to get ahead. However I&#x27;m also not sure the study really examined the idea too well, and ended up feeling like it&#x27;s the sort of thing that could be misinterpreted and overleveraged.<p>In my personal experience (which is limited) there&#x27;s a certain constellation of organizational characteristics that leads to disagreeable individuals attaining power, and organizational &quot;combativeness&quot; isn&#x27;t really it. I think &quot;corruption&quot; is closer, and good luck measuring that with a self report survey.<p>Then again, maybe the relevant issue isn&#x27;t whether or not people who are jerks are more likely to attain power, it&#x27;s than once they&#x27;re there they&#x27;re more likely to cause problems, and they&#x27;re not <i>less likely</i> to attain power. So then them being in power is salient.<p>But then I think you have to ask, why aren&#x27;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&#x27;d think that certain settings would inhibit one or the other of those processes.<p>I guess I feel like this is a case where studying normative organizational dynamics in a cursory way could end up being really misleading.