ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
People with disagreeable personalities (selfish, combative, and manipulative) do not have an advantage in pursuing power at work.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 41 citations in OpenAlex.
- Citizens in democratic countries have more benevolent traits, fewer malevolent traits, and greater well-being.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Development and validation of the medical students' self-reported selfishness questionnaire (MSSSQ): a context-specific design for assessing selfish tendencies in medical education.BMC medical education · 2025Article
- Expression of prestige through authentic pride, not dominance through hubristic pride, promotes fairness in ultimatum bargaining.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Generational Egoism: Concept and Measurement.Psychology research and behavior management · 2025Article
- Beyond Words: Speech Coordination Linked to Personality and Appraisals.Journal of nonverbal behavior · 2025Article
- Dominance in humans.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Research and leaders: a twisted tale!Trends in genetics : TIG · 2021Article
- Dominance is necessary to explain human status hierarchies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Does being disagreeable-that is, behaving in aggressive, selfish, and manipulative ways-help people attain power? This question has long captivated philosophers, scholars, and laypeople alike, and yet prior empirical findings have been inconclusive. In the current research, we conducted two preregistered prospective longitudinal studies in which we measured participants' disagreeableness prior to entering the labor market and then assessed the power they attained in the context of their work organization ∼14 y later when their professional careers had unfolded. Both studies found disagreeable individuals did not attain higher power as opposed to extraverted individuals who did gain higher power in their organizations. Furthermore, the null relationship between disagreeableness and power was not moderated by individual differences, such as gender or ethnicity, or by contextual variables, such as organizational culture. What can account for this null relationship? A close examination of behavior patterns in the workplace found that disagreeable individuals engaged in two distinct patterns of behavior that offset each other's effects on power attainment: They engaged in more dominant-aggressive behavior, which positively predicted attaining higher power, but also engaged in less communal and generous behavior, which predicted attaining less power. These two effects, when combined, appeared to cancel each other out and led to a null correlation between disagreeableness and power.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.