I think it might be an instance of you tend to really remember the exceptions so they stand out, and also in some cases if they root themselves in enough you tend to also end up with an org of that personality so it can be all you see.
> If disagreeableness does not help individuals attain power, why do so many people believe that nice guys (and gals) finish last? Given our studies focused on the attainment of power, does disagreeableness help people maintain power once they possess it?
This study seems like common sense. Extroverted people who are agreeable climb the fastest.
People confuse disagreeable with “asshole”. Most assholes can be agreeable, just how they play the game is disagreeable. Political assholes take credit for others work and never take risk. Controlling assholes micromanage and suggest everything was their idea. Most disagreeable people hardly get promoted. It seems rather obvious that being liked tends to serve you well regardless of your expertise. Of course the Peter principle and Dilbert principle can kick in because of this.
Let's take it a step further: agreeable people don't care about good engineering. They can't, by definition.
Standing up for an idea or principle makes one disagreeable. An engineer who is just "going with the flow" is not bringing any expertise to the table.
To be clear, there are limits to how much and when one should stand-up for an idea or principle (i.e. pick your battles). Someone who fights every battle is, once again, entering asshole territory. But if being agreeable means picking no battles, then what are you even doing?
exactly, seems like a big oversimplification. I'm "agreeable" at work, as in, let's see if you are correct about your way, and if not, we'll correct it based on the data. Rarely there is a predictable binary decision about how to build stuff, at least in software.
I use the "safe enough to try" test. If I can't convince my coworker or employee that my idea has better tradeoffs (using my 30+ years of experience), I'm humble enough to know that maybe I'm wrong. I then ask myself the question "is what they are proposing safe enough to try?" If the answer is yes, then they will do their work their way and we'll learn something. They will learn the old guy might know a thing or two or I'll learn that new things come along all the time.
No, that's massively oversimplified. 'disagreeableness' is not literally about how often you disagree, it's about how you disagree. The OP defines it in the first sentence as 'behaving in aggressive, selfish, and manipulative ways' which is much more than simply disagreeing. It's quite possible to be an agreeable person, and still push through major changes.
Exactly. This is an entire paper around whether someone wants to be 'right or effective.' I may know the right answer and how to move forward, but if I'm an asshole about it (aggressive, manipulative and selfish), then I'm less likely to effect change.
That can happen. I think it's often a symptom of other issues though, either with the org or with that engineers communication skills. An organisation needs to reach commitment on a course of action, and if you disagree at the right points it isn't seen as being disagreeable (either before stakeholders have become too invested, or after they have but when it has become clear that the living with the issues is too painful). The problem is that some orgs either don't seek feedback widely enough, or are not flexible enough to avoid committment until sufficient experts have had a say. Especially if that org is one that culturally doesn't value engineers.
Which is why the study didn't ask "is this person disagreeable" of laypeople who happen to be their coworkers, but used psychological tests designed to measure the psychological version of the term over 14 years.
If you make everybody happy, you're a politician and you're not being effective in your role. With the caveat that many people don't fully understand their role within an organization. A given person is more likely to have been hired to go with the flow than to provide, say, technical rigor or sanity checks.
Some of the best engineers I’ve ever worked were just “going with the flow”. They certainly brought tons to the table. Some people are just quiet and don’t like conflict. If you ask them what they think plus give them a calm environment, time and support you can find yourself looking at some very elegant easy to maintain systems.
Extraversion is completely separate from agreeableness in psychology. They are independent personality traits based on the Big Five model (which is the most scientifically supported model).
If you're disagreeable, extraverted and intelligent, that's usually a recipe for naturally rising up the pecking order in engineering organizations at least.
> 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.
So it's openly disagreeable personalities who have the disadvantage. I would think that successful manipulative (trait the study assigns to disagreeable) persons would engage in "communal and generous behavior" as tactic and generally hide their disagreeableness.
Idk, it seems like agreeable people get into management faster, it just depends on the type. There are the agreeable people that do everything they can and go with the flow, but aren't visible because they don't stand out. Then there is agreeable that say things and do things to appear productive but really are faking competence. It's a little more cunning. Then they get into management where they don't need to be technically competent and their people pleasing pushes them higher, based on relying on others to do the work, or outright lying about the status of things.
Disagreeable people can get to low management I think because if they stick around for years they're probably very competent and are willing to say the unpopular correct thing. But they stop rising because they don't play the game for the sake of playing the game. Unless they are adept at politicing. But the agreeable people seem to rise faster because they don't have friction. The problem is when they have issues delivering, but if there are things to blame besides themselves, it helps take the heat off them.
Counterargument: There are a lot of nice people that end up in early graves, as they often forgo taking care of their own needs in life due to a misplaced sense of obligation.
Corollary: if the Good do tend to die younger, than they cannot rise to positions of power.
There are different degrees of power and influence.
I've found that people who are disagreeable to management indeed might have trouble getting promoted and climb the corporate ladder, but at the same time they might be tremendously influential among their peers.
This is also a common effect that can be observed in anti-establishment/opposition structures, both in work-related (e.g leaders of trade unions) and political manners (e.g opposition parties). The leaders of said organizations can often be hugely influential within, but at the same considered highly disagreeable/assholes by the people on the other side.
> Let's take it a step further: agreeable people don't care about good engineering. They can't, by definition.
This! However, that generally leads to disagreeable engineers being very popular with their peers, and not so popular with management, unless the company is inherently engineer/dev focused.
"being disagreeable-that is, behaving in aggressive, selfish, and manipulative ways" - am I the only one finding this definition incorrect? I think a disagreeable person is one not willing to accept an opinion they find incorrect. None of the attributes they listed seem relevant :) Or maybe I'm just being disagreeable
I think aggressive or maybe excessive is a part of that. When you're not willing to accept an opinion and just give up, it's one thing. If you put up a huge fight every single time, it's more of a problem.
I agree - this is how it is generally used, and usage determines the meaning of words. You cannot, in general, deduce the precise meaning of words from first principles or the dictionary definitions of related words.
'Opinionated' is a related word which does not mean exactly what it might seem from 'opinion'.
In academia, there is plenty of disagreement, mostly handled without being disagreeable.
Agreeableness/disagreeableness have specific meanings in personality psychology.
Agreeableness in the five-factor model (Big Five) doesn't necessarily mean being overly compliant; it can also mean being trustful or altruistic (trust and altruism being two facets of agreeableness).
The study uses five-factor terminology with participants completing the Big Five Inventory (BFI) and some also completing the NEO-PI-R, so those are the definitions to keep in mind here.
That is extremely interesting. I had no idea that the Big Five had been formulated based originally on linguistic analysis (specifically of English). It's a brilliant direction to research. But it also accounts for the pretty obvious bias in the terminology.
As a layman, possibly under the distant influence of Jordan Peterson, I thought "disagreeable" meant strong-willed, principled, uncompromising (on what one considers important), direct, etc., i.e. what the article probably designates as "combative"; and was surprised to see "selfish", "manipulative", and "deceitful" also lumped into this category. These seem to be so different personality traits...
I guess Jordan Peterson, which I consider a master of nonsense, has to go through the dictionary again. The Oxford Languages definition of disagreeable is:
- upleasant or unenjoyable
- unfriendly and bad tempered
At least the first definition fits well with Jordan I believe. Maybe this is his guilty conscience trying to give meaning to the fact that he is fundamentally disagreeable?
> The Oxford Languages definition of disagreeable is:
General-purpose Oxford dictionaries are not the appropriate reference for a term from clinical psychology. Jordan uses the term "agreeableness", and, as its derivatives, adjectives "agreeable" and "disagreeable". If you consult psychology texts, e.g. Handbook of Personality Psychology [0], you will notice that what has been understood by it has varied: some interpreted it as conformity or compliance (which is more in line with the impression I got from Peterson), whereas others interpreted it as likeability or pleasantness, which is more in line with the title of the paper.
Odd question. Why is this person creating such a strong reaction in some? Unless I am mistaking him for someone else, he struck me as an educated version Joel Osteen ( with oddly similar outlook on life ). I watched some of his videos and found little beyond somewhat generic 'good things come if you work for them' prosperity gospel equivalent.
In personality psychology, factors like agreeableness are umbrellas over often very different subfactors called facets.
Facets of agreeableness include altruism and compliance, which are two very different things. Someone may be altruistic while also breaking the rules. Someone else may be compliant but stingy. But both could score high in agreeableness.
This is interesting because it counters the idea that someone has to be a jerk to get ahead. However I'm also not sure the study really examined the idea too well, and ended up feeling like it's the sort of thing that could be misinterpreted and overleveraged.
In my personal experience (which is limited) there's a certain constellation of organizational characteristics that leads to disagreeable individuals attaining power, and organizational "combativeness" isn't really it. I think "corruption" is closer, and good luck measuring that with a self report survey.
Then again, maybe the relevant issue isn't whether or not people who are jerks are more likely to attain power, it's than once they're there they're more likely to cause problems, and they're not less likely to attain power. So then them being in power is salient.
But then I think you have to ask, why aren'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'd think that certain settings would inhibit one or the other of those processes.
I guess I feel like this is a case where studying normative organizational dynamics in a cursory way could end up being really misleading.
The most powerful people seem to do shady and aggressive things but always keep a professional and calm composure on the outside, no matter what. (Think of politicians who have remained in power for a long time)
As maybe an interesting business example, Elon has begun to shed the calm outward composure more and more over the last 5 years and has lost more wealth than anyone in history at the same time. Maybe that is coincidental but one wonders.
Yes. People at the top have a natural affinity for power. They intuitively understand power, they feel it, and they don’t feel any shame about seeking and wielding power.
These are the type of people we’ve chosen to reward in society and unfortunately most people have drunk the kool-aid and have been convinced that these people deserve to be rewarded. And even further, they think society can’t function unless we reward these people!
It's not a conscious choice. And it's not a choice with even odds against the alternative. It's choice with more benefits than deficits.
Historically (back to the very beginning of us as social animals) these are the type of people that quickly and surely make high risk and high reward decisions. And those are the types of decisions that determine life or death, feast or famine, in the wild.
This sounds like the evolutionary psychology equivalent of a backronym. Is there any evidence for this other than, "It makes sense if you think about it," or is it speculation?
All ev psych, even the most accurate stuff, runs the risk of being a backronym sooner or later because it attempts to canalize future possibility based on biological history. It tends to contain some teleology in the implicit assumption that humans today are peak human and that all evolution is biological.
However, that said, it is very difficult in my experience to make correct decisions for a large organization if you prioritize personal relationships. Often, we define that behavior as corruption.
I like to consider the “big” aspects as the top-down social/experiential/phenomenological side.
I think the future of ev psych is more in the bottom-up: what the evolutionary sub modules are and how do they articulate with each other to produce aspects of awareness/behavior — the stuff the Salk Institute is doing with using ML/AI to understand cognition, for example.
Ev psych? Certainly. But as a second order effect.
I was thinking game theory, from the prisoners dilemma complex as a first principal.
And the whole thing as a cocktail napkin guess. I'm not a scientist nor do I have decades and millions of human monies to run proper tests.
I was trying to give a little wide grounding to the "we choose" token which sounded to me like the difference between choosing pants for the day or a type of beer. It's not arbitrary, low cost, novel, or small scale.
Reverting to the school playgorund, everyone in the dominant group are nice to each other, they are horrible to those outside the powerful dominant group.
Which circle you exist in, determines if that person is 'agreeable' or 'disagreeable'. The workplace is no different.
Steve Jobs was agreeable, as long as you agreed with him. /s
Seriously tho, there seems to be a difference between people who are trying to sell you/force their POV and straight up contrarians who will always take an adversarial position for kicks.
The former _can_, at least be productive, the latter is just a roadblock.
You don't have to be a jerk to get ahead. And being a jerk won't get you ahead. What you need is to not care if you look like a jerk.
Sometimes you'll feel you're right so strongly that you'll just not care if people disagree with you. And when you will not budge on an item at all, people are going to think of you as a bit of a jerk.
I believe some with power are jerks. I do not believe being a jerk increases efficacy. If anything, they share qualities.
For example, if someone prioritizes their interests before another's, are they a jerk? The distinction depends on whichever construct you've subscribed to.
The conflation was mostly my fault. I read "disagreeable personalities" and my head went to the Big Five.
IMO a better way to think of it is that someone needs to be a jerk to get ahead. The three things we're accusing people of in this topic (being selfish, combative, and manipulative) are the three things that all companies do all the time. We want to launder that, I think.
I kind of disagree with this. Biased sample, but ime the type of powerful / influential people who run large prestigious organizations are almost all extremely charismatic and diplomatic. Very agreeable - without necessarily agreeing to anything :)
Note that I did not say morally / ethically prudent, self actualized, or not prone to being a shithead at times. Just that they tend not to be disagreeable.
We're not jerks. We're people who notice problems. You're shooting the messenger.
Every problem that tech has comes from treating disagreeable people as pariahs. Organizational bloat and tech debt are still issues even when we're not there. Avoid hiring disagreeable people and you'll arrive at the stereotypical tech org that can't get anything done. If you don't have disagreeable people to solve your issues, you have to use the other tool: Layoffs.
Discriminating against people because they're disagreeable is insane. It's a Big Five personality trait. You hate half of humanity. Evolution produced the best problem-solving thing ever, humanity, and you decided a lot of the work done there was just pointless.
The real reason disagreeable people are valuable and can attain power in the workplace is because you've made it so with this completely unreasonable bias you have. They're not supposed to be extremely rare! That only happens in the tech workplace.
Would you similarly discriminate against anxious people? What about people who aren't open to new experiences? Do you shut them out too? How does your ideology square with black people being way more disagreeable on average? Let me guess: You don't hire any and then mumble something about culture fit.
Working with disagreeable people doesn't suck. Working sucks. The disagreeable people just point it out. How do you ever improve without that? Working at an all-agreeable-people tech firm is a Kafkaesque nightmare of everything being perfect and nothing getting done. And you all deserve it because you decided that when people tend to be one way or the other, the ones who are like you are just better.
Strong disagree. It is possible to disagree without being disagreeable, and I personally find it frustrating when people excuse their behaviour in the manner you are doing. Yes work sucks, but being unpleasant, cynical and snarky just makes it even worse. Roll up your sleeves and help or please get out of the way.
Absolutely, organizations need someone who will stand up and ensure important things are dealt with, but doing so does not require being unpleasant. This is something I’ve actively tried to cultivate in myself, and have been happy to receive feedback both that I am “not at all a yes-man” and am “someone who has a calming presence” by coworkers.
I think that being the unpleasant version of “not a yes-man” just means that people will try to find ways around you.
I'm known as the nice friend who will tell you hard things. I'm a nice guy who knows how to be a dick when I have to be. I actively work on both being "softer" as I probably have gone a bit too direct, and being more assertive as I can be too easy going. I usually like the balance I've struck, and often have people thank me after I tell them hard, serious stuff. I wish more people could do that, know so many jerks. Being assertive does NOT mean you have to be ass.
How would you do it the other way? If you started off as disagreeable and had to learn agreeability? Do you think you could do that without ever being an ass? Do you think it's fair that you got a chance to develop towards a happy middle but someone working from the other end would never get that chance?
I have trouble believing someone could never end up starting as an ass, and end up been agreeable. I've known too many people who have moderated over the course of their lives. However, everyone who even tries to stand up to anyone else risks being an ass, so everyone with a backbone probably will be at some point.
Most people naturally become more agreeable over the courses of their lives (as well as less neurotic and more conscientious). Beyond that, intentional personality change also seems to be possible. For example, this is a study that used a coaching app to help people change aspects of their personality [1]; apparently, people who wanted to increase agreeableness did see pretty large effect sizes.
This study, and the person you're replying to, are using the term disagreeable in the Big Five psychology sense. They don't mean unpleasant, cynical, or snarky. Sometimes disagreeable people are snarky, but they don't have to be.
You do, actually, have to be disagreeable to disagree. Agreeable people don't like to cause a fuss and just go along with stuff even if they disagree internally. Disagreeable people are the people who tend to disagree. That's all it means. Some of them are snarky assholes (you right now?), and others are just people who disagree.
"Disagreeable" in common parlance means difficult, overly-critical, and aggressive, but that's not what 's being said here.
But the Big Five Inventory [1] does explicitly ask if subjects consider themselves to sometimes be cold, distant, rude, unkind, selfish, or inconsiderate of others, and these answers are all used to compute their (dis)agreeableness scores. Similar questions also show up in other inventories. So, without even getting into any other behaviors these traits might correlate with, the Big 5 definition of "disagreeable" extends well beyond literally just tending to disagree with others.
No, it's not possible, if you're disagreeable. Being disagreeable is a matter of personality, not a matter of personal choice. It would be like me disagreeing while not being tall. I can't do it because I am tall all the time.
Obviously disagreeable can agree or disagree, and they can do either well or badly (I happen to be very good at both, thanks). It doesn't change who they are while doing it. Just like someone who isn't open to new experiences doesn't experience a personality change while trying a new restaurant.
Disagreeable people do, as a group, have more unpleasant, cynical and snarky people. But that doesn't mean that all people in that group are that way. It's not fair for you to assign me these qualities and then argue against them when I'm talking about disagreeable people at large. Again, it's half the population so there's a wide spectrum of outcomes.
As a somewhat disagreeable person, I have to agree.
So much of my time spent at work is in a state of frustration at processes and people. I think it's my job to be vocal about what I see, either to improve the situation, or correct my perspective (i.e. learn!).
However.. I have to sanitize my language and use the most gross of corporate speak. I often sleep on it before sending a contentious email. I'm still the team asshole, but an old boss said every team needs one ;)
Once upon a time, I worked with a particular person. At one point we were evaluating version control alternatives and he looked at one. He said it was great, but would never respond when anyone asked, "How do you do X, Y, or Z?" Eventually we picked one of the others (partially because he would never tell us why his was better), but he refused to accept that, resulting in the team lead having to develop a script to exchange changes between the system he used and the one everyone else used. He's also the guy who kept commenting out "-Wall" from our C++ Makefile with comments like "Nobody has time for that." (Though apparently, I had time to fire up Valgrind and track down all the memory issues, most of which would have been caught by compiler warnings.) He also considered "Maybe I'll just throw myself under a bus" to be a valid technical point during a discussion.
I began my career at IBM, where the loudest, most aggressive person got to be in charge. I have a lot of experience working around disagreeable co-workers---usually by doing things their way, whether or not it is best for the project---because there's no other way to get anything done. But then, I don't consider constant bike-shedding arguments as getting things done.
Fortunately, I don't have to do that any more. I've quit jobs because I couldn't stand spending more of my time keeping a disagreeable person happy (well, not happy; they're never going to be happy) than getting my actual work done. (Oh, that co-worker from the first paragraph? A few years later he sent me an email asking if I would be a reference. I said no.)
As a self-IDed somewhat "disagreeable" person, I have mixed feelings about this. I think you're absolutely right that people who notice and articulate problems can come to be viewed negatively, and it places a double burden on them to notice the problem and then come up with the perfect way of articulating it that can't possibly hurt anyone's feelings. And if no one is willing or able to assume that burden, and there isn't a tolerance for some negativity in the workplace, it leads to exactly the thing you mention, a place where "everything is perfect and nothing gets done".
On the other hand, I do think it's possible to assume this double burden, and the people who do it well can become the most valued people in an organization. Consider taking it as yet another problem that you can work on!
The hidden superpower of the "neurotic" and "disagreeable" is being sensitive to how things are not great, which helps give rise to the drive to improve. And that drive can and should be applied to our sometimes socially suboptimal ways of expressing ourselves. An "opportunity to improve" can be a lot more popular than a "way things suck", depending on who you're working with.
Disagreeable people often have an over-the-top people-pleaser side because they're bad at agreeability. For them it's usually a choice of being a doormat or a jerk.
When people are bad at agreeability in this way, but still agreeable, nobody is in a rush to correct them. Nobody threatens to quit over the doormat. But it's the exact same personality flaw, just expressed differently in Big Five terms.
I got The Fixer. Very interesting test. I'm kind of impressed/mystified at how it got so much information about me from those questions. Like Myers-Briggs but seemingly both more ambitious theoretically and using fewer questions. I wonder how it would fare under psychometric validation (as I understand MBTI doesn't fare well despite being so popular and so many people including me finding insight there).
Re: agreeability, it seems like you're speaking of it as a skill more than just a personality variable. I see the skill of being prosocial and the personality trait of agreeability as separate. I see myself as a high-functioning disagreeable person, where I see things more negatively than average and have more conflictual feelings than average, but usually manage to turn it all into something effective and prosocial when working with other people.
Thanks! Yeah the test is super creepy. You can email me if you have questions (see profile).
The "disgust" in your result (I have one too) is what's rare in tech and mostly what I'm talking about here. The Fixer is holding the entire industry together, from where I'm sitting, and the only archetype I ever 'click' with (I'm fear/disgust/pride, so we both have that instant inner critical voice). They are really good at the disgust -> prosocial process you mention. My archetype is... way worse at that.
Re: Skill. Yeah it's both, agreed. A role for virtue too.
The article describes disagreeable people as "selfish, combative, and manipulative." And "Does being disagreeable-that is, behaving in aggressive, selfish, and manipulative ways-help people attain power?"
Which, to me, sounds very different from voicing concerns or identifying problems.
This reeks of all-or-nothing thinking, which itself reeks of deep insecurity (a very likely root condition of being disagreeable).
It's one thing to have differing thoughts and opinions. It's another thing to be "disagreeable", which is the personality trait of being difficult to work with, often for the sake of being contrarian or having an ego trip (i.e, proving that you are right to showcase your power and value relative to others).
As others have stated, disagreeing is orthogonal to being disagreeable. One can disagree via constructive dialogue and open communication; however, taking disagreeableness as an identifying personality trait (and moreover, holding it as valuable in-and-of-itself) is a slippery slope to the creation of toxic working relationships.
> It's one thing to have differing thoughts and opinions. It's another thing to be "disagreeable", which is the personality trait of being difficult to work with, often for the sake of being contrarian or having an ego trip (i.e, proving that you are right to showcase your power and value relative to others).
You have the psychology wrong. That's not what the term disagreeable means in personality psychology.
You don't quite get the Big Five personality trait. It's poorly labelled, I'll grant. But "disagreeable (big five sense)" and "disagreeing with people" have no correlation I am aware of. I am also not aware of any studies showing that disagreeable people are more likely to voice their disagreements in a group setting.
> Would you similarly discriminate against anxious people?
As a bomb-disposal tech? Yes. As a cashier? No. Similarly, would I discriminate against a disagreeable person as a manager? Yes. As a solitary programmer? No.
> We're not jerks. We're people who notice problems. You're shooting the messenger.
The definition is literally in the title: "disagreeable personalities (selfish, combative, and manipulative)".
So, yes, by definition, disagreeable people are jerks. If that's you, then you, too, are a jerk.
That is completely orthogonal to "people who notice problems". If someone thinks that it's necessary to be "selfish, combative, and manipulative" in order to notice a problem, then that person is not only a jerk, but also deluding themselves that they're just misunderstood.
I was talking about this in a Big Five sense, but yeah. I agree with you. If you're not at work to be selfish, combative and manipulative, you are not at work. What do you even do all day? Why are we here? A workplace full of people who don't need the paycheck isn't a workplace. People who aren't fighting for something don't care. People who aren't manipulating don't care about the future.
Ideas that aren't challenged suck. The same is true for people, at the individual and organizational level. I don't think believing this makes me a jerk.
"Disagreeableness is a relatively stable aspect of personality that involves the tendency to behave in quarrelsome, cold, callous, and selfish ways (1). ... For example, disagreeable people tend to be hostile and abusive to others (2), deceive and manipulate others for their own gain (3), and ignore others’ concerns or welfare (4)."
Your comments such as "...as pariahs", "if you don't have disagreeable people to solve your issues, you have to use the other tool: Layoffs", "insane", and "hate" are exactly the sort of quarrelsome, manipulative statements that make working with someone 'disagreeable' so difficult. You aren't noticing problems; you're not pointing them out. What you are doing is demanding everyone else adapt to you, and you are using twisted emotional, disingenuous language to do it.
My argument is that disagreeable people aren't inherently bad. Your argument is that I'm disagreeable so I'm inherently bad. I get it. You don't like disagreeable people. We can just agree to disagree here. I'm not asking anything of you.
If were to make demands, it'd be in the form of helpful emotional advice: Hire so that at least 1 out of 6 people at your company are disagreeable. Don't ever allow agreeability silos, especially not around top executives. Never let a disagreeable person serve in a leadership role unless they have at least one disagreeable person working as a direct report.
If I were to give advice, I'd suggest not taking advice from someone who thinks that you are insane, that you hate half of humanity, or that you treat them as pariahs simply because they are quarrelsome, hostile, abusive, and manipulative.
Tech workplaces hold no special claim to conformity.
It's not uncommon for big old professions and specialities to have institutes and charters which include compulsory precepts along the lines of "thou shalt not publicly disagree with or badmouth thy fellow".
There, agreeing-to-agree is foundationally baked in; the very professions are sustained around the continual churning out of cookie-cutter journeymen, with intergenerational progress carefully, hierarchically regulated such that the profession all steps forward together.
Different workplaces will punish or reward these personalities in very different ways.
In my experience, if a company rewards disagreeable people who use shady tactics, politics, and power plays by giving them more power, it's not going to be a good place to work.
On the other hand, a culture that legitimately rewards people who play well together and reduces the influence of people who use politics and other games, there's a good chance it's going to be a good place to stay for many years.
I suspect a lot of people start their careers in the first type of company (rewards bad behavior) and assume it's totally normally. It's the only environment they know, so they assume all workplaces operate by the same rules. When you think all workplaces are equally bad, you start losing motivation to find a better culture at a different company. You might also start imitating some of the bad behavior that seems to be working out for other people. In a way, disagreeableness and office politics are contagious.
My advice to anyone who thinks that it's normal for companies to reward the "bad" employees at the expense of the "good" employees is that you might be at a company with backwards priorities. Consider prioritizing good peer references in your next job search to find a company that is better at these things. No workplace is perfect, but you don't want to work at a company that is consistently bad at reward alignment.
I really would like to know what is "disagreeable" does it mean being mean to people in obvious ways a lot? In that case of course. But in my experience most people in corporate settings will stab you in the back when it suits them, blame things on you, take credit falsley,etc... all while smiling and being sociable. So you can have an agreeable personality and still be a shitty person based on how you actually behave.
> [Disagreeable people] 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
The one thing I've observed disproportionately among sr execs: they're charismatic & collaborative right up until your interests diverge - and then they're ruthless. Some disagreeable personality traits _are_ actually important - they're just insufficient.
That's a related skill, but not the same thing. It's more that once they think "this is a battle," they win. They may just dominate in the meeting if they need to, but they also might just shmooze with your skip-level manager.
Think of Tom Brady - he's a charismatic guy, but if you're on his team and slack off, he'll get you cut without a second thought.
Seeing the office as a warzone which will, if you knife enough enemies (in the front or back - it doesnt matter), eventually be conquered in your favour and the spoils going to the you the victor ... is the real skill.
Many of the disagreeable personalities I dealt with over the years were that way to co-workers and direct reports. They were completely different when dealing with their superiors. They did well because of that, even when employee opinion surveys (if they were managers) were factored in.
That is also a big flaw in the study. Personality is very much dependent on context. So they measured disagreeability (1) as part of their extra-credit course work, and (2) as a follow-up. To really get into the work environment, either one has to do ethnographic field work, or make assumptions about disagreeability based on other factors.
My gut instinct is that it will not be an advantage in any kind of knowledge work, because you need ICs to do deep work with enough agency to make the right local decisions. Even if you are very smart, dictating based on an abstract high-level vantage will quickly hit a wall.
That said, I think historically disagreeable types had a bigger advantage because the world was simpler and a lot of times just having the courage of your convictions and appearing strong would be enough to rally people behind you. There's probably quite a bit of latent psychological tendencies in the populace that still allow that to work in some circumstances, but in the modern corporate world, especially tech, you'll get your lunch eaten if you can't get the best out of smart people.
> If disagreeableness does not help individuals attain power, why do so many people believe that nice guys (and gals) finish last?
Perhaps because jealous and petty people are naturally inclined to have contempt for anybody with a higher status than them. By hiding behind platitudes like that, they can conceal the immature motives of their contempt and instead claim a moral high ground as an excuse for their failures.
That seems like the most obvious explanation to me at least.
It's because they're exaggerating or intentionally choosing to believe a simple narrative. Lots of people find they have to make a few decisions that are upsetting, even damaging to others, in order to get ahead.
Maybe when people see this, they assume that because a nice person would never do that, nice people can't get ahead. The truth is that the decision could be more complicated, with some people being helped, when others our damaged. It could be a straightforward decision that anybody in that position has to make.
It's a lot easier to just look at the bad and say nice guys finish last or that leaders must be jerks. The truth is more nuanced and is more like: "Leaders sometimes have to make decision that hurts some people, and will almost always (save for maybe the best of times) be hated by some"
> Perhaps because jealous and petty people are naturally inclined to have contempt for anybody with a higher status than them. By hiding behind platitudes like that, they can conceal the immature motives of their contempt
I have to ask: Are you in management or an executive? This sounds like the version these people would tell themselves to sleep at night. "They just hate me because they're jealous"
It's more that while management is important, many managers wind up being greedy and/or arrogant despite still being a small part of a big puzzle. They're privy to information that we aren't, get higher pay scales, and have an easier time protecting themselves and managing their careers, due to that position of privilege.
They get raised to a higher class and it goes to their head. For some extreme examples you can see the fall from grace of a number of billionaires Musk, Zuckerberg... I'd even add Marc Cuban. What do these people really do that's so special? That's been called into question lately. I appreciate that they took big risks and won, but that doesn't pertain to ongoing projects; in fact, it seems to just give people god complexes.
So it's more the entitlement, privilege, and how it goes to people's heads. Not "jealousy".
Are you replying to the wrong comment? I never said that and someone else did.
I consider myself a gray area guy that's gotten exactly where they planned to, and doesn't really care about "getting ahead"... in many ways I'd rather not, as long as the checks keep clearing, and the pay is decent enough.
There does seem to be a change in the way decisions are being "managed" at least from my perspective; I'm not sure how much of it is related to work from home, and how much is hangover from the "we're all in this together" COVID response, or from some other direction - but I seem to be experiencing meetings that start and end with "lets just do this thing" and almost never touch the subject of "why are we doing this thing" anymore.
Selfish, combative, and manipulative - are you confusing us with sociopaths?
I don't see disagreeable people as more selfish, just less willing to compromise on what they think are bad ideas.
Combative? Not quite, we're talking disagreeability, not aggressiveness (a better word would just be disagreeable, but then you'd have no need to call us selfish and manipulative).
Manipulative? Go fuck yourself. Why would I try to trick you into doing what I want, when I can tell you that you're wrong and ignore you instead?
i think as we get older, we get better at distancing ourselves and realizing that work is just work.
But as the one always the most dissatisfied with what we do and how we do it and what is left out, i try to understand and give empathy than the easier solution which would be head through the wall :)
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadAnd even that doesn't help them?
I'm glad it's like that, it's just a bit off for me a bit.
This study seems like common sense. Extroverted people who are agreeable climb the fastest.
People confuse disagreeable with “asshole”. Most assholes can be agreeable, just how they play the game is disagreeable. Political assholes take credit for others work and never take risk. Controlling assholes micromanage and suggest everything was their idea. Most disagreeable people hardly get promoted. It seems rather obvious that being liked tends to serve you well regardless of your expertise. Of course the Peter principle and Dilbert principle can kick in because of this.
Standing up for an idea or principle makes one disagreeable. An engineer who is just "going with the flow" is not bringing any expertise to the table.
To be clear, there are limits to how much and when one should stand-up for an idea or principle (i.e. pick your battles). Someone who fights every battle is, once again, entering asshole territory. But if being agreeable means picking no battles, then what are you even doing?
Usually other people's bidding
this sounds like another way of saying there is ever only one right way of doing something?
If on the other hand you believe that engineering is about tradeoffs, then being agreeable might be a willingness to work out what tradeoffs to make.
Either way, we are better off for it.
Mr. Rogers speaking to Congress.
I've seen this first hand. It's always smooth sailing politically to just go along with what the leader(s) say.
Which is why the study didn't ask "is this person disagreeable" of laypeople who happen to be their coworkers, but used psychological tests designed to measure the psychological version of the term over 14 years.
If you make everybody happy, you're a politician and you're not being effective in your role. With the caveat that many people don't fully understand their role within an organization. A given person is more likely to have been hired to go with the flow than to provide, say, technical rigor or sanity checks.
So it's openly disagreeable personalities who have the disadvantage. I would think that successful manipulative (trait the study assigns to disagreeable) persons would engage in "communal and generous behavior" as tactic and generally hide their disagreeableness.
Corollary: if the Good do tend to die younger, than they cannot rise to positions of power.
Happy 2023 =)
I've found that people who are disagreeable to management indeed might have trouble getting promoted and climb the corporate ladder, but at the same time they might be tremendously influential among their peers.
This is also a common effect that can be observed in anti-establishment/opposition structures, both in work-related (e.g leaders of trade unions) and political manners (e.g opposition parties). The leaders of said organizations can often be hugely influential within, but at the same considered highly disagreeable/assholes by the people on the other side.
> Let's take it a step further: agreeable people don't care about good engineering. They can't, by definition.
This! However, that generally leads to disagreeable engineers being very popular with their peers, and not so popular with management, unless the company is inherently engineer/dev focused.
'Opinionated' is a related word which does not mean exactly what it might seem from 'opinion'.
In academia, there is plenty of disagreement, mostly handled without being disagreeable.
Agreeableness in the five-factor model (Big Five) doesn't necessarily mean being overly compliant; it can also mean being trustful or altruistic (trust and altruism being two facets of agreeableness).
The study uses five-factor terminology with participants completing the Big Five Inventory (BFI) and some also completing the NEO-PI-R, so those are the definitions to keep in mind here.
On page 113 we find the following most associated with low-aggreableness:
> Fault-finding, cold, unfriendly, quarrelsome
And with high-aggre,
> Sympathetic, Kind, appreciative, affectionate
Now I do not read either as having to do with the picture of "selfish, combative, and manipulative".
I find the agreeable kind of manipulativeness, ie., the "Jerry-kind" (from Rick & Morty) just as egregious as the "Rick-kind".
What might equally be said of this study is that "agreeable methods of manipulation" are as effective as "disagreeable ones" in aggregate.
You have to average it over self-assessments and also the assessment of all your friends, family, and coworkers.
- upleasant or unenjoyable
- unfriendly and bad tempered
At least the first definition fits well with Jordan I believe. Maybe this is his guilty conscience trying to give meaning to the fact that he is fundamentally disagreeable?
General-purpose Oxford dictionaries are not the appropriate reference for a term from clinical psychology. Jordan uses the term "agreeableness", and, as its derivatives, adjectives "agreeable" and "disagreeable". If you consult psychology texts, e.g. Handbook of Personality Psychology [0], you will notice that what has been understood by it has varied: some interpreted it as conformity or compliance (which is more in line with the impression I got from Peterson), whereas others interpreted it as likeability or pleasantness, which is more in line with the title of the paper.
[0] - Its chapter on agreeableness is, luckily, available online at http://cachescan.bcub.ro/e-book/E1/580591/795-870.pdf
Here's where you're going wrong.
Facets of agreeableness include altruism and compliance, which are two very different things. Someone may be altruistic while also breaking the rules. Someone else may be compliant but stingy. But both could score high in agreeableness.
In my personal experience (which is limited) there's a certain constellation of organizational characteristics that leads to disagreeable individuals attaining power, and organizational "combativeness" isn't really it. I think "corruption" is closer, and good luck measuring that with a self report survey.
Then again, maybe the relevant issue isn't whether or not people who are jerks are more likely to attain power, it's than once they're there they're more likely to cause problems, and they're not less likely to attain power. So then them being in power is salient.
But then I think you have to ask, why aren'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'd think that certain settings would inhibit one or the other of those processes.
I guess I feel like this is a case where studying normative organizational dynamics in a cursory way could end up being really misleading.
As maybe an interesting business example, Elon has begun to shed the calm outward composure more and more over the last 5 years and has lost more wealth than anyone in history at the same time. Maybe that is coincidental but one wonders.
These are the type of people we’ve chosen to reward in society and unfortunately most people have drunk the kool-aid and have been convinced that these people deserve to be rewarded. And even further, they think society can’t function unless we reward these people!
It's not a conscious choice. And it's not a choice with even odds against the alternative. It's choice with more benefits than deficits.
Historically (back to the very beginning of us as social animals) these are the type of people that quickly and surely make high risk and high reward decisions. And those are the types of decisions that determine life or death, feast or famine, in the wild.
However, that said, it is very difficult in my experience to make correct decisions for a large organization if you prioritize personal relationships. Often, we define that behavior as corruption.
I think the future of ev psych is more in the bottom-up: what the evolutionary sub modules are and how do they articulate with each other to produce aspects of awareness/behavior — the stuff the Salk Institute is doing with using ML/AI to understand cognition, for example.
I was thinking game theory, from the prisoners dilemma complex as a first principal.
And the whole thing as a cocktail napkin guess. I'm not a scientist nor do I have decades and millions of human monies to run proper tests.
I was trying to give a little wide grounding to the "we choose" token which sounded to me like the difference between choosing pants for the day or a type of beer. It's not arbitrary, low cost, novel, or small scale.
Which circle you exist in, determines if that person is 'agreeable' or 'disagreeable'. The workplace is no different.
Seriously tho, there seems to be a difference between people who are trying to sell you/force their POV and straight up contrarians who will always take an adversarial position for kicks.
The former _can_, at least be productive, the latter is just a roadblock.
You don't have to be a jerk to get ahead. And being a jerk won't get you ahead. What you need is to not care if you look like a jerk.
Sometimes you'll feel you're right so strongly that you'll just not care if people disagree with you. And when you will not budge on an item at all, people are going to think of you as a bit of a jerk.
For example, if someone prioritizes their interests before another's, are they a jerk? The distinction depends on whichever construct you've subscribed to.
IMO a better way to think of it is that someone needs to be a jerk to get ahead. The three things we're accusing people of in this topic (being selfish, combative, and manipulative) are the three things that all companies do all the time. We want to launder that, I think.
Note that I did not say morally / ethically prudent, self actualized, or not prone to being a shithead at times. Just that they tend not to be disagreeable.
Every problem that tech has comes from treating disagreeable people as pariahs. Organizational bloat and tech debt are still issues even when we're not there. Avoid hiring disagreeable people and you'll arrive at the stereotypical tech org that can't get anything done. If you don't have disagreeable people to solve your issues, you have to use the other tool: Layoffs.
Discriminating against people because they're disagreeable is insane. It's a Big Five personality trait. You hate half of humanity. Evolution produced the best problem-solving thing ever, humanity, and you decided a lot of the work done there was just pointless.
The real reason disagreeable people are valuable and can attain power in the workplace is because you've made it so with this completely unreasonable bias you have. They're not supposed to be extremely rare! That only happens in the tech workplace.
Would you similarly discriminate against anxious people? What about people who aren't open to new experiences? Do you shut them out too? How does your ideology square with black people being way more disagreeable on average? Let me guess: You don't hire any and then mumble something about culture fit.
Working with disagreeable people doesn't suck. Working sucks. The disagreeable people just point it out. How do you ever improve without that? Working at an all-agreeable-people tech firm is a Kafkaesque nightmare of everything being perfect and nothing getting done. And you all deserve it because you decided that when people tend to be one way or the other, the ones who are like you are just better.
I think that being the unpleasant version of “not a yes-man” just means that people will try to find ways around you.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2017548118
You do, actually, have to be disagreeable to disagree. Agreeable people don't like to cause a fuss and just go along with stuff even if they disagree internally. Disagreeable people are the people who tend to disagree. That's all it means. Some of them are snarky assholes (you right now?), and others are just people who disagree.
"Disagreeable" in common parlance means difficult, overly-critical, and aggressive, but that's not what 's being said here.
It's not about "passive" vs "assertive" like you claim. Both of those can be agreeable!
[1] https://arc.psych.wisc.edu/self-report/big-five-inventory-bf...
Obviously disagreeable can agree or disagree, and they can do either well or badly (I happen to be very good at both, thanks). It doesn't change who they are while doing it. Just like someone who isn't open to new experiences doesn't experience a personality change while trying a new restaurant.
Disagreeable people do, as a group, have more unpleasant, cynical and snarky people. But that doesn't mean that all people in that group are that way. It's not fair for you to assign me these qualities and then argue against them when I'm talking about disagreeable people at large. Again, it's half the population so there's a wide spectrum of outcomes.
-1 for strawman
disagreeing with someone and raking high on Disagreeableness BigFive trait are two different things
So much of my time spent at work is in a state of frustration at processes and people. I think it's my job to be vocal about what I see, either to improve the situation, or correct my perspective (i.e. learn!).
However.. I have to sanitize my language and use the most gross of corporate speak. I often sleep on it before sending a contentious email. I'm still the team asshole, but an old boss said every team needs one ;)
I began my career at IBM, where the loudest, most aggressive person got to be in charge. I have a lot of experience working around disagreeable co-workers---usually by doing things their way, whether or not it is best for the project---because there's no other way to get anything done. But then, I don't consider constant bike-shedding arguments as getting things done.
Fortunately, I don't have to do that any more. I've quit jobs because I couldn't stand spending more of my time keeping a disagreeable person happy (well, not happy; they're never going to be happy) than getting my actual work done. (Oh, that co-worker from the first paragraph? A few years later he sent me an email asking if I would be a reference. I said no.)
On the other hand, I do think it's possible to assume this double burden, and the people who do it well can become the most valued people in an organization. Consider taking it as yet another problem that you can work on!
The hidden superpower of the "neurotic" and "disagreeable" is being sensitive to how things are not great, which helps give rise to the drive to improve. And that drive can and should be applied to our sometimes socially suboptimal ways of expressing ourselves. An "opportunity to improve" can be a lot more popular than a "way things suck", depending on who you're working with.
Disagreeable people often have an over-the-top people-pleaser side because they're bad at agreeability. For them it's usually a choice of being a doormat or a jerk.
When people are bad at agreeability in this way, but still agreeable, nobody is in a rush to correct them. Nobody threatens to quit over the doormat. But it's the exact same personality flaw, just expressed differently in Big Five terms.
Re: agreeability, it seems like you're speaking of it as a skill more than just a personality variable. I see the skill of being prosocial and the personality trait of agreeability as separate. I see myself as a high-functioning disagreeable person, where I see things more negatively than average and have more conflictual feelings than average, but usually manage to turn it all into something effective and prosocial when working with other people.
The "disgust" in your result (I have one too) is what's rare in tech and mostly what I'm talking about here. The Fixer is holding the entire industry together, from where I'm sitting, and the only archetype I ever 'click' with (I'm fear/disgust/pride, so we both have that instant inner critical voice). They are really good at the disgust -> prosocial process you mention. My archetype is... way worse at that.
Re: Skill. Yeah it's both, agreed. A role for virtue too.
Eerily, from so few questions, it got so many things things right about both me (The Wizard) and my wife (The Duelist).
> Working with disagreeable people doesn't suck
W00t! By definition it does.
> The disagreeable people just point it out
Ah, perhaps you mean disagree-ing people. That would make some sense at least.
Which, to me, sounds very different from voicing concerns or identifying problems.
This reeks of all-or-nothing thinking, which itself reeks of deep insecurity (a very likely root condition of being disagreeable).
It's one thing to have differing thoughts and opinions. It's another thing to be "disagreeable", which is the personality trait of being difficult to work with, often for the sake of being contrarian or having an ego trip (i.e, proving that you are right to showcase your power and value relative to others).
As others have stated, disagreeing is orthogonal to being disagreeable. One can disagree via constructive dialogue and open communication; however, taking disagreeableness as an identifying personality trait (and moreover, holding it as valuable in-and-of-itself) is a slippery slope to the creation of toxic working relationships.
You have the psychology wrong. That's not what the term disagreeable means in personality psychology.
> Would you similarly discriminate against anxious people?
As a bomb-disposal tech? Yes. As a cashier? No. Similarly, would I discriminate against a disagreeable person as a manager? Yes. As a solitary programmer? No.
The definition is literally in the title: "disagreeable personalities (selfish, combative, and manipulative)".
So, yes, by definition, disagreeable people are jerks. If that's you, then you, too, are a jerk.
That is completely orthogonal to "people who notice problems". If someone thinks that it's necessary to be "selfish, combative, and manipulative" in order to notice a problem, then that person is not only a jerk, but also deluding themselves that they're just misunderstood.
Ideas that aren't challenged suck. The same is true for people, at the individual and organizational level. I don't think believing this makes me a jerk.
Your comments such as "...as pariahs", "if you don't have disagreeable people to solve your issues, you have to use the other tool: Layoffs", "insane", and "hate" are exactly the sort of quarrelsome, manipulative statements that make working with someone 'disagreeable' so difficult. You aren't noticing problems; you're not pointing them out. What you are doing is demanding everyone else adapt to you, and you are using twisted emotional, disingenuous language to do it.
If were to make demands, it'd be in the form of helpful emotional advice: Hire so that at least 1 out of 6 people at your company are disagreeable. Don't ever allow agreeability silos, especially not around top executives. Never let a disagreeable person serve in a leadership role unless they have at least one disagreeable person working as a direct report.
It's not uncommon for big old professions and specialities to have institutes and charters which include compulsory precepts along the lines of "thou shalt not publicly disagree with or badmouth thy fellow".
There, agreeing-to-agree is foundationally baked in; the very professions are sustained around the continual churning out of cookie-cutter journeymen, with intergenerational progress carefully, hierarchically regulated such that the profession all steps forward together.
In my experience, if a company rewards disagreeable people who use shady tactics, politics, and power plays by giving them more power, it's not going to be a good place to work.
On the other hand, a culture that legitimately rewards people who play well together and reduces the influence of people who use politics and other games, there's a good chance it's going to be a good place to stay for many years.
I suspect a lot of people start their careers in the first type of company (rewards bad behavior) and assume it's totally normally. It's the only environment they know, so they assume all workplaces operate by the same rules. When you think all workplaces are equally bad, you start losing motivation to find a better culture at a different company. You might also start imitating some of the bad behavior that seems to be working out for other people. In a way, disagreeableness and office politics are contagious.
My advice to anyone who thinks that it's normal for companies to reward the "bad" employees at the expense of the "good" employees is that you might be at a company with backwards priorities. Consider prioritizing good peer references in your next job search to find a company that is better at these things. No workplace is perfect, but you don't want to work at a company that is consistently bad at reward alignment.
One can be a jerk without being disagreeable. Think of the classic smooth talking con artist.
> [Disagreeable people] 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
The one thing I've observed disproportionately among sr execs: they're charismatic & collaborative right up until your interests diverge - and then they're ruthless. Some disagreeable personality traits _are_ actually important - they're just insufficient.
Think of Tom Brady - he's a charismatic guy, but if you're on his team and slack off, he'll get you cut without a second thought.
Not only did I not get promoted, I got fired. AMA
That said, I think historically disagreeable types had a bigger advantage because the world was simpler and a lot of times just having the courage of your convictions and appearing strong would be enough to rally people behind you. There's probably quite a bit of latent psychological tendencies in the populace that still allow that to work in some circumstances, but in the modern corporate world, especially tech, you'll get your lunch eaten if you can't get the best out of smart people.
In organizations of sufficient size, if you run something important enough, everyone will have input - at the worst times.
No, I won't fundamentally change the design on a whim because of something you noticed.
I'll discuss it and work with you towards it, but I will not be strong-armed.
This has gone as far as me outright refusing to do things that reached executives -- being able to prevent them, because I/my team own the keys.
Perhaps because jealous and petty people are naturally inclined to have contempt for anybody with a higher status than them. By hiding behind platitudes like that, they can conceal the immature motives of their contempt and instead claim a moral high ground as an excuse for their failures.
That seems like the most obvious explanation to me at least.
But yeah, most people see themselves as good, and synonymize that with nice. All of our own flaws are minor, while other people's flaws are major.
Maybe when people see this, they assume that because a nice person would never do that, nice people can't get ahead. The truth is that the decision could be more complicated, with some people being helped, when others our damaged. It could be a straightforward decision that anybody in that position has to make.
It's a lot easier to just look at the bad and say nice guys finish last or that leaders must be jerks. The truth is more nuanced and is more like: "Leaders sometimes have to make decision that hurts some people, and will almost always (save for maybe the best of times) be hated by some"
> Perhaps because jealous and petty people are naturally inclined to have contempt for anybody with a higher status than them. By hiding behind platitudes like that, they can conceal the immature motives of their contempt
I have to ask: Are you in management or an executive? This sounds like the version these people would tell themselves to sleep at night. "They just hate me because they're jealous"
It's more that while management is important, many managers wind up being greedy and/or arrogant despite still being a small part of a big puzzle. They're privy to information that we aren't, get higher pay scales, and have an easier time protecting themselves and managing their careers, due to that position of privilege.
They get raised to a higher class and it goes to their head. For some extreme examples you can see the fall from grace of a number of billionaires Musk, Zuckerberg... I'd even add Marc Cuban. What do these people really do that's so special? That's been called into question lately. I appreciate that they took big risks and won, but that doesn't pertain to ongoing projects; in fact, it seems to just give people god complexes.
So it's more the entitlement, privilege, and how it goes to people's heads. Not "jealousy".
You seem to be suffering from the symptoms described in the sibling comment
> All of our own flaws are minor, while other people's flaws are major.
And of course it’s jealousy, and not just for the elite either. Most people hate to see anybody succeed.
I consider myself a gray area guy that's gotten exactly where they planned to, and doesn't really care about "getting ahead"... in many ways I'd rather not, as long as the checks keep clearing, and the pay is decent enough.
I don't see disagreeable people as more selfish, just less willing to compromise on what they think are bad ideas.
Combative? Not quite, we're talking disagreeability, not aggressiveness (a better word would just be disagreeable, but then you'd have no need to call us selfish and manipulative).
Manipulative? Go fuck yourself. Why would I try to trick you into doing what I want, when I can tell you that you're wrong and ignore you instead?