Want to Get Paid More? Be Disagreeable.

Research confirms what baseball legend Leo Durocher once said: Nice guys (and gals) finish last -- at least when it comes to compensation. Can HR find a balance between being aggressive and being agreeable at work? By Michael O'Brien Niceness -- in the form of the trait of agreeableness -- does not appear to pay. So say the researchers behind a new report, Do Nice Guys -- and Gals -- Really Finish Last? which looks at the way the trait of being agreeable affects compensation in the workplace. The results are based on

20 years of data from three different surveys, involving 10,000 workers in various industries and pay grades, as well as an experiment involving more than 400 respondents. The report will appear in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of Personality and Psychology. The researchers found that men who gave themselves a below-average agreeableness score earned approximately

18 percent, or $9,772, more annually, than their nicer male colleagues. Yes, nice guys did tend to make less than their less-agreeable counterparts, says study co-author Beth A. Livingston, an assistant professor of human resource studies at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations in Ithaca, N.Y. Less-agreeable men are more likely to negotiate for raises or higher starting salaries, she says, noting that there was not as much of an effect for women. For women, the disagreeableness effect yielded only a five-percent annual pay bump, or $1,826. Livingston's co-authors were Timothy Judge of the University of Notre Dame and Charlice Hurst of the University of Western Ontario. Livingston says the idea for such research came while pondering the gender-wage gap, and after studying it after all these years, we still don't know what's going on. A conversation with Judge, who studies personalities, led them to the study, she says. Tim said, 'No one has ever looked at the personality statistics behind compensation,' she recalls. It was a beautiful opportunity. In addition to the two decades' worth of data, they also ran their own experiment using 460 undergraduate students who were asked to act as hiring managers for a made-up company. The students were directed to read short descriptions of candidates who were up for a managerial position and then make a recommendation. Male candidates who were identified as highly agreeable were less likely than less agreeable men to be recommended for the position, the researchers found. We weren't asking them to set the pay level, she says, we were just asking whether they should put this person on management track or not. We asked these students to make these decisions, and all we did was vary whether the was unassuming or self-absorbed. Livingston says she thinks the reason behind the students' preferences may lie with their own preconceptions of what a male manager should be. Our conjecture is that you have these implicit ideas on what a manager is. And it's not always just the skills and competencies that are considered, she says. Livingston says she and her co-authors were unsure the experiment would work. 'No one's going to really think that the arrogant person should be on the management track, ' she recalls thinking before the experiment, but extremely strong evidence came back that the 'arrogant' man was seen as much more management type than the agreeable one. The clear recommendation of the students for the promotion of arrogant men did not return the same bias when women were assessed, Livingston adds. It was null for women, she says. So how should hiring managers and HR leaders approach this prickly situation, especially in light of a recent survey by Jeannie Trudel of Indiana Wesleyan University-Marion that found 86 percent of 289 workers reported incivility at work? The construct of agreeableness is a very complex structure, says Livingston. They make less money, but they do tend to have better quality relationships and higher satisfaction, and that's a major takeaway from this: These nice guys are getting paid less, but that doesn't mean they're less happy. Steve Langerud, a professor at DePauw University, says it's a no-win situation to turn a blind eye to disagreeable people or their actions. What I have found in working with clients over the years is that it doesn't pay to pretend the less-agreeable behaviors exist, he says. Those who can name, embrace and manage the behaviors in productive ways are light years ahead of those who simply ignore it. He advises HR leaders not to shy away from talking about -- or to -- less-agreeable workers. Make a point of conversation within the organization by naming the behaviors, he says. Give everyone a common language to talk about behaviors at work and how they contribute to long-term success. But Rick Brenner, a management consultant based in Cambridge, Mass., says he's unconvinced that arrogance pays off as indicated by the research because the data does not cover a long-enough period of time, nor do the researchers take into account changes in behavior over time. This is important, he says, because it is possible that less-agreeable people actually do finish last in terms of lifetime income, even though their income might be significantly higher than their more agreeable peers for short periods while they remain employed. The studies the authors examined do not rule out the possibility that being less agreeable can be both acutely career-advantageous and chronically career-toxic, he says. It is also possible, he adds, that agreeableness is not a static trait. That is, our level of agreeableness might change over a career in response to perceived future prospects, current context and past experience. It is for this reason that longitudinal personality data is essential for any study that attempts to answer the questions this study supposedly addresses. Regardless, Livingston says, HR leaders should start a discussion on the topic with their managers on being aware of any possible -- although paradoxical -- biases in favor of less-agreeable workers. She says managers need to be aware that [they might] have a bias toward loud and bombastic guys, and the nice guys might get overlooked. Obviously, a lot of the times HR folks look for policy prescriptions to fix this sort of thing, she says. 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