Is being selfish enough to get you far in the working hierarchy?
Аccording to a recent study, being entirely self-focused wouldn’t help the progress of your career.
Prof. Cameron Anderson from the University of California has worked on conducting personality tests of thousands of students from three different American universities. After about 14 years, his team followed up 671 of the participants and organized another round of personality interviews.
One-third of these former students participated in more detailed research, Truth Theory reveals. They were asked more complex questions and their answers were then verified by interviews taken of their coworkers.
According to Prof. Anderson, the study discovered that there are certain personality traits that contribute to success. However, being selfish, disrespectful, or dishonest was not among those special features.
Surprised by the results, the expert said that negative traits like disagreeability didn’t benefit one’s career path, ‘even in more cutthroat, ‘dog-eat-dog’ organizational cultures’. However, Prof. Anderson doesn’t say that jerks don’t reach positions of power. As per Medical Xpress, he explained:
“The bad news here is that organizations do place disagreeable individuals in charge just as often as agreeable people. In other words, they allow jerks to gain power at the same rate as anyone else, even though jerks in power can do serious damage to the organization.”
Although being selfish doesn’t help the growth of people’s professional achievements, it doesn’t harm it either.
The specialists involved in the study claim that being kind provides as little advantage as being selfish when it comes to climbing the professional ladder. They were hoping their study would find a relationship where both the extremes of personality fail to scale the ladder. But instead, they discovered that both had almost the same opportunity to land themselves a promotion or a higher job position.
Despite the fact that some kindhearted people convert to egocentrics just to get higher in the hierarchy, the researches concluded:
“Disagreeableness is a relatively stable aspect of personality.”
Do you believe that selfish people are landing better jobs regardless of their competency? Let us know in the comment section!
