Is being nice holding you back at work?<\/p>\n
One viral TikTok has young workers up in arms about the perils of being pleasant in the workplace.<\/p>\n
A TikToker who goes by the name Jacqueline recently posted a TikTok video where she claimed that people who are \u201ca pleasure to work with\u201d will \u201cnever get promoted.\u201d<\/p>\n
The video has struck a nerve and has now racked up 8 million views and 900,000 likes.<\/p>\n
Jacqueline says in the video that executives \u201cwill never allow an employee who is both good at doing the work and good at keeping a smile on their face while doing the work move up the ladder, because they know they can keep serving you sh-t on a platter and you\u2019ll eat it with a smile.\u201d<\/p>\n
She added: \u201cYou will never be promoted out of a hardworking more junior position where a lot of the hard work exists … If you are in an executive suite, you do not have to be a pleasure to work with or good at your job.\u201d<\/p>\n
TikTok users in the comment section largely agreed with Jacqueline and put a name to her theory called \u201cperformance punishment\u201d where good workers are assigned more tasks as a consequence of being reliable and effective.<\/p>\n
Although the stereotype that jerks are more successful has long persisted, evidence suggests otherwise.<\/p>\n
A 2020 study by Cameron Anderson, a professor of organizational behavior at the Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley, found that people with disagreeable personalities do not progress any faster in the workplace than agreeable people.<\/p>\n
The study used results from a personality test taken by college students and graduates 14 years prior and how their careers turned out after.<\/p>\n
It found that disagreeable people had two distinct traits that canceled out any career gains. This is that they were dominant and assertive which helped them attain power, but they were also more selfish and less communal which is a trait viewed negatively by coworkers.<\/p>\n
You can reap certain benefits by being pleasant at work, especially if you can make your colleagues\u2019 lives easier, according to Andrew Brodsky, a management professor at the University of Texas at the McCombs School of Business.<\/p>\n
\u2033<\/strong>Helping other people and being other-oriented can give you the benefit that people trust you more, which means access to a variety of resources, like information that not everyone in the organization has access to,\u201d Brodsky said to CNBC Make It.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can also gain status by being seen as someone who\u2019s useful to everyone and others like to reward those who they feel like are deserving. There\u2019s a lot of benefits to being other-oriented like we like nice people and we do nice things for those people,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n A 2022 study by researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the University of Iowa and Purdue University looked at the outcomes of prosocial motivation in the workplace \u2014 meaning people who like to help others.<\/p>\n It found through an analysis of 200 studies that workers with high levels of prosocial motivations experience greater wellbeing, career advancement, and job performance.<\/p>\n Although there\u2019s a popular view that most CEOs are narcissists, Ryan Vogel, an associate professor at the Fox School of Business and Management at Temple University, said this isn\u2019t necessarily true.<\/p>\n People who do things for others and are open to the idea of reciprocating good things \u201cdo better for themselves in their careers,\u201d Vogel told CNBC Make It. \u201cPeople want to be associated with those kinds of people.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNarcissists are quite good at pulling the wool over people\u2019s eyes momentarily but eventually people catch on,\u201d he added. \u201cYes, there are a lot of CEOs that are narcissists but there\u2019s a lot of CEOs that are not narcissists as well. Not every narcissist wins the tournament and ends up as a CEO.\u201d<\/p>\n However, there are some caveats to being too nice.<\/p>\n In Jacqueline\u2019s TikTok video, she conflates having a pleasant personality with being a pushover, according to Vogel. <\/p>\n \u201cA pushover would be like anchoring the far end of the scales of high agreeableness,\u201d Vogel said. \u201cI would say, pleasant is not necessarily as high on agreeableness. Pleasant people don\u2019t bend over backwards. They\u2019re not necessarily people pleasers but they treat people civilly.\u201d<\/p>\n Brodsky agrees with this view and says that being too \u201cother-oriented\u201d can sometimes backfire because you lose focus on your own self-interests.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen that happens, you might not fight for your self-interest as much as you need which at times can be necessary in organizations.\u201d<\/p>\n Part of the reason the video has been such a hit on social media is that people\u2019s expectations of corporate loyalty has been violated in recent years and workers have become much more critical of leaders as a result, according to Brodsky.<\/p>\n \u201cThe work relationship has changed over the past number of decades. It used to be you work 40 years at an organization, you get a gold watch or whatever and then you retire. Now, there isn\u2019t very much corporate loyalty and especially right now, in the time of layoffs,\u201d Brodsky says.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you have organizations that aren\u2019t loyal to their employees, you would expect that employees become less loyal to their organizations.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Is being nice holding you back at work? One viral TikTok has young workers up in arms about the perils of being pleasant in the workplace. A TikToker who goes by the name Jacqueline recently posted a TikTok video where she claimed that people who are \u201ca pleasure to work with\u201d will \u201cnever get promoted.\u201d The video <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2576,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2575","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}