Will being nice stop you from doing your job?
A viral TikTok has sparked a backlash among young workers who fear the dangers of being cheerful in the workplace.
A TikTok user named Jacqueline recently posted a TikTok videos People who are “a pleasure to work with” “will never get promoted,” she claimed.
The video attracted attention and has now received 8 million views and 900,000 likes.
Jacqueline says in the video that senior management “will never allow an employee to be promoted who is both good at their job and good at keeping a smile on their face while doing it because they know they can continue to serve you.” Put it on a plate and you’ll smile Eat it.
She added: “You’re never going to be promoted from a hard-working entry-level position, there’s a lot of hard work there… If you’re in the C-suite, you don’t have to be happy to work with people and you don’t have to be good at your job.” .
TikTok users in the comments section largely agreed with Jacqueline and gave her theory a name: “Performance Penalty” Good employees are assigned more tasks because they are reliable and efficient.
Although the stereotype that jerks are more successful has long persisted, evidence suggests otherwise.
A Cameron Anderson 2020 ResearchA professor of organizational behavior at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, found that asocial people did not advance in the workplace faster than agreeable people.
The study used the results of personality tests taken by college students and graduates 14 years ago and their subsequent career progression.
Research has found that unlikable people have two distinct characteristics that counteract any progress they make in their careers. Their dominance and assertiveness help them gain power, but they are also more selfish and less communal, traits that are viewed negatively by their colleagues.
How to make progress
Andrew Brodsky, a management professor at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business, says being cheerful at work can pay dividends, especially if you can make your coworkers’ lives easier. .
“Helping others and being other-centered can benefit you and make people trust you more, which means you have access to various resources, such as information that not everyone in the organization has access to,” Brodsky said in an interview said in an interview with CNBC Make It.
“You can also gain status by being seen as someone useful to everyone and others like to reward those they deem worthy. There are many benefits to being other-oriented, for example we like good people and we do good things for those people People,” he added.
A 2022 study Researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the University of Iowa, and Purdue University studied the consequences of prosocial motivation in the workplace—that is, people who like to help others.
An analysis of 200 studies found that employees with high levels of prosocial motivation experience greater happiness, career development and job performance.
Despite the common belief that most CEOs are narcissists, Ryan Vogel, an associate professor at Temple University’s Fox School of Business and Management, says that’s not necessarily true.
Vogel told CNBC Make It that people who do things for others and enjoy giving back “do better for themselves in their careers.” “People want to associate with these types of people.”
“Narcissists are very good at temporarily pulling the wool over people’s eyes, but eventually people will understand,” he added. “Yes, there are a lot of CEOs who are narcissists, but there are also a lot of CEOs who are not narcissists. Not every narcissist wins the race and ends up becoming a CEO.”
However, there are some caveats to being too nice.
‘Agreeable people don’t bend over backwards.”
Vogel said that in Jacqueline’s TikTok videos, she mixes a cheerful personality with compulsive behavior.
“Giving in easily is like anchoring the far end of the scale of high agreeableness,” Vogel says. “What I’m trying to say is that pleasant people aren’t necessarily agreeable. People who are pleasant don’t go out of their way. They’re not necessarily likeable people, but they treat people with courtesy.”
Brodsky agreed, saying that being too “other-oriented” can sometimes be counterproductive because you lose focus on your own interests.
“When that happens, you may not be fighting for your own interests as much as you need to, which is sometimes necessary in an organization.”
Brodsky said part of the reason the video has become so popular on social media is that expectations of corporate loyalty have been violated in recent years, and employees have become more critical of their leaders as a result.
“Working relationships have changed over the past few decades. It used to be that you worked for an organization for 40 years, you got a gold watch or something, and then you retired. Now, there’s not a lot of corporate loyalty. Degree, especially loyalty.
“When your organization is not loyal to its employees, you would expect employees to be less loyal to their organization.”
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