Hiring for Agreeableness

Personality plays a BIG part in how we get along with others.  Of course, this impacts not only one’s personal life but professional life as well.  Our personality is always with us, influencing what we think, what we feel, and how we behave.

Each person’s personality is comprised of five broad personality traits.  A trait is also referred to as an attribute, characteristic, feature, particularity, peculiarity, or quality.  Known as the Big Five, these traits were defined in the 1970s by two research teams led by Paul Costa and Robert R. McCrae of the National Institutes of Health and Warren Norman and Lewis Goldberg of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Oregon.  The Big Five are the ingredients that make up each individual’s personality.  The acronym spells OCEAN.

1. Openness to experience
2. Conscientiousness
3. Extroversion
4. Agreeableness
5. Neuroticism

Within each of the five, there are sub-traits.  Each major trait exists on a spectrum or scale such as “extroversion / introversion”, “openness to experience / aversion to experience”, etc.  It is the unique extent to which these traits manifest in a person that reflects his/her behavior and attitude toward others.  These traits can be genetically determined.  Other times, they are learned.  We all have good and bad character traits.  That is something worth remembering when hiring.  No one is perfect.  No one is perfectly good or perfectly bad.

Understanding Agreeableness

Each area of personality is important in the workplace.  But perhaps none is more critical than agreeableness.  People who are agreeable are described as obliging, polite, kind, and friendly.  People who are highly agreeable are more trusting, affectionate, altruistic and generally display more prosocial behaviors than those who are less agreeable.   People high in this prosocial trait have a high degree of empathy and show great concern for the well-being of others.  They are the first to help those in need. This trait also measures the extent of a person’s warmth.  Agreeable people usually have a wide circle of friends and seem pretty happy.

Each person’s degree of affability and friendliness is combined with other personality traits that impact effectiveness and ability to work well with others.  Indeed, agreeableness plays a huge part in how employees interact with clients, colleagues, vendors, managers and coworkers.   Cooperation and collaboration is impacted by the degree of agreeableness in the team members.

Conventional personality research defines agreeableness as two related qualities:

1. the extent to which a person values getting along with others, and
2. the degree to which that person is willing to be critical of others.

The more agreeable someone is, the more likely they are to be helpful and compassionate.   Less agreeable people might be colder and more suspicious of others, and they tend to be less cooperative and collaborative with others.

Like all aspects of personality, agreeableness is measured on a scale or spectrum with highly-agreeableness at one end of the spectrum and highly-disagreeableness at the other end.  Each person’s personality tends to fall at some point in that spectrum on a consistent basis, but it can vary based on culture, upbringing, setting, situation and interaction.

While it is well-established that agreeableness plays a critical role in how people work together, there is less consensus on how agreeableness affects workplaces and careers.  For example, one might assume that the more agreeable a person is, the better they do professionally.  However, researchers have not found that to be true.  It actually depends on gender, position and other factors.

Agreeableness is not a Panacea

Let’s start with what people believe about “niceness.”  While it may seem that high level of agreeableness is the best trait to demonstrate in any job, there is a risk that comes with being seen as too agreeable.  People who are “too agreeable” might be seen as less intelligent, especially in the workplace. Some of the same traits that people associate with intelligence run contrary to agreeableness.  Attempts to be modest, share the blame, lead quietly, and defer to other’s interests can could make an agreeable employee seem incompetent even though they aren’t.  That could affect the person’s upward mobility.

There is also a stereotype that male leaders tend to make decisions without worrying what other people think.  It is thought that they don’t care if they are seen as cold and unfeeling.  This is not necessarily true, but it is a generalization people make.  That’s because leaders often have to make difficult and unpopular decisions.  In fact, a study found that when people were asked to evaluate potential leadership candidates, men considered disagreeable ranked as the most attractive potential leaders, followed by agreeable and disagreeable women.  And, highly agreeable men were rated least attractive as potential leaders.

Why?  Two reasons.  The first has to do with the ability to get along.  In reality, career advancement requires a willingness to make tough decisions, ruffle feathers and do unpopular things from time to time.  Good leaders have to be able to tell people things they do not want to hear.  And, they have to be able to self-promote, which by definition means highlighting one’s own accomplishments over those of colleagues.

The second has to do with a leader’s ability to criticize others.  While some leaders want to surround themselves with employees who only tell them what they want to hear, the most effective leaders want people around them who will point out flaws in a plan before it is implemented or express doubts and issues.  Highly agreeable people are less likely to want to give this kind of feedback because they want to be liked, but less agreeable people have less trouble being critical.

So to what extent is the stereotype true?  A 2012 study by Timothy Judge, Beth Livingston, and Charlice Hurst published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that in the workplace, “disagreeable” men (those who were less agreeable on the spectrum) actually earn more – up to $10,000 more per year — than agreeable males.  Whereas, disagreeable women did not have the same salary advantage.  This suggests a no-nonsense demeanor is uniquely beneficial to men in the workplace.  It is impossible to know if being less agreeableness actually helped men climb the leadership ladder or if the fact that people think that less agreeable people make better leaders is what led to them being promoted into leadership positions.  It is an example of which came first, the chicken or the egg.  Whatever the case, it is clear that being somewhat less agreeable could serve be an asset to some in the workplace.

So what are highly agreeable people to do if they want to improve their chances of upward mobility?  The first step is for each person to identify exactly where he/she falls on the agreeableness spectrum.  There are a number of evaluation tools that measure all areas of personality to define exactly where he/she is on the scale.  For those who are highly agreeable, it will take some effort to balance the scale.  In meetings, they should make a concerted effort to share flaws, if any, when a plan presented.  For those who really have trouble criticizing others, they should imagine that another company wants to implement the plan and then identify what could go wrong.  By making it about a neutral organization, it is easier for a highly-agreeable person to be honest.  After providing two positive comments, the person should deliver a true assessment of what can go wrong.  While it is fine to express concerns with empathy, it is important to be clear and direct.

The Down Side of Being Disagreeable

But, this is not a green light for people to be rude, contrarian, difficult or unpleasant!  Quite the contrary.  While less agreeable men are more likely to be promoted into positions of leadership and more likely to earn more, that is not permission to be mean at work.  It turns out that there is a fine line between being someone who can criticize and do what needs to be done and being someone who is unpleasant and with whom no one wants to work.

Another reason why being less agreeable is bad is because people often don’t want to work with less agreeable people is because it often a product of envy.  Often, the root cause of disagreeableness at work.  Envy was found to be the most common personality type out of four studies in a report published in August 2016 in the journal, Science Advances.  Envious people feel threatened when someone else is more successful than they are so they might behave in ways that cause deep divisions and strife.  Indeed, the data shows that less agreeable people are more likely to lose their jobs than agreeable ones.  Long-term this would be bad for business and bad for that person’s career.  So being disagreeable is risky.

Hiring for Agreeableness

There are many occupations where being highly agreeable is good.  Registered nurses.  Team managers.  Realtor.  Mental health counselors.  Hotel managers.  Human resources specialists.  School teachers.  Any profession where people need to collaborate and cooperate requires agreeableness.

As for positions where being less agreeable is not very important, there are many.   Creative writers.  Accountants.  Economists.  Astronomers.  Statisticians.  Photonics technicians.  Aircraft and automobile mechanics.  Web administrators.  Computer engineers.  Hydrologists.  But, there is actually an emerging school of leadership thought that companies actually need more people who are just mildly agreeable and can offer honest criticism and make unpopular decisions.

As companies go through the process of hiring or rehiring after the pandemic, it is wise to hire a mix of personality types from those who are highly agreeable and work well with others and those who are less agreeable (not rude) but able to provide criticism and honest feedback.  It is only with a balance of personalities that a business can get the most creativity, productivity and effectiveness from its team.

Quote of the Week

“It is with rivers as it is with people: the greatest are not always the most agreeable nor the best to live with.” Henry Van Dyke

© 2021, Keren Peters-Atkinson. All rights reserved.