Workplace Dynamics: According to a widely circulated TikTok belief, good people don’t advance. Experts, however, differ.

Despite the long-standing misconception that jerks are more successful, the evidence seems to indicate contrary.

TFD – Discover the crucial role of employee loyalty in shaping workplace dynamics and fostering professional advancement.

Is being polite making you less productive at work?

Young employees are alarmed about the dangers of being kind at work after seeing a popular TikTok.

In a recent TikTok video, a user going by the name Jacqueline asserted that those who are “a pleasure to work with” will “never get promoted.”

Due to its emotional appeal, the video has received 900,000 likes and 8 million views.

In the video, Jacqueline claims that managers “will never allow an employee to move up the ladder if they are good at both doing the work and maintaining a smile on their face because they know they can keep serving you sh-t on a platter and you’ll eat it with a smile.”

“You will never be promoted out of a more junior position where a lot of the hard work exists,” the woman continued. You do not need to be an excellent employee or a delight to work with if you are in an executive suite.

In the TikTok comment section, fans mainly agreed with Jacqueline and named her notion of “performance punishment,” which holds that dependable and productive employees get given additional work as a reward.

Despite the long-standing misconception that jerks are more successful, the evidence seems to indicate contrary.

According to a 2020 study by organizational behavior professor Cameron Anderson of the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, unpleasant personalities do not advance in the workplace more quickly than agreeable ones.

The study examined the outcomes of a personality test completed by college students and graduates fourteen years earlier, as well as the subsequent trajectory of their careers.

It was discovered that the two unique characteristics of disagreeable persons negated any professional advancement. This is because, while their assertiveness and dominance helped them gain power, their greater selfishness and decreased sense of community were seen adversely by their colleagues.

Ways to advance

According to Andrew Brodsky, a management professor at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business, there are definite advantages to being amiable at work, particularly if you can make your coworkers’ lives simpler.

People will trust you more if you help them and show empathy, according to Brodsky, who spoke with CNBC Make It. This will open doors to a range of resources, including knowledge that not everyone in the company has access to.

Being viewed as someone who benefits everyone else might also help you rise in status because people want to provide rewards to those who they believe deserve them. Being other-oriented has many advantages, such as making us enjoy nice people and want to do pleasant things for them,” he continued.

Researchers from Purdue University, the University of Iowa, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong examined the effects of prosocial motivation in the workplace in 2022. Prosocial motivation refers to the tendency for people to want to assist others.

After 200 studies were analyzed, it was discovered that employees with strong prosocial incentives perform better at work and have higher levels of wellbeing and career advancement.

Ryan Vogel, an associate professor at Temple University’s Fox School of Business and Management, refuted the widely held belief that the majority of CEOs are narcissists.

According to Vogel, those who are giving and willing to accept help from others “do better for themselves in their careers.” This was stated to CNBC Make It. “People want to be in the same social circles as those people.”

He said, “Narcissists are quite good at temporarily blinding people, but eventually people catch on.” Indeed, there are a lot of narcissistic CEOs, but there are also a lot of CEOs that are not. Not every narcissist becomes a CEO after winning the competition.

Being overly polite does have its limitations, though.

“Those who are pleasant don’t go above and beyond”

Vogel claims that Jacqueline confuses being a pushover with having a nice demeanor in her TikTok video.

According to Vogel, “being a pushover would be like anchoring the far end of the scales of high agreeableness.” “I would argue that agreeableness is not always correlated with pleasantness. People who are pleasant don’t go above and beyond. Although they don’t always try to win over others, they do treat them with respect.

According to Brodsky, who shares this opinion, being overly “other-oriented” can occasionally backfire since it causes you to lose sight of your own interests.

“If that occurs, you may not fight for your own interests as much as you should, which is sometimes important in organizations.”

The fact that people’s expectations of corporate loyalty have been broken in recent years and workers have grown much more skeptical of executives as a result, according to Brodsky, is part of the reason the video has become so popular on social media.

Over the past few decades, the working relationship has evolved. In the past, after forty years of service to an organization, one would retire and get a gold watch or something similar. Corporate loyalty is lacking these days, particularly in light of the recent layoffs, according to Brodsky.

“You would expect employees to become less loyal to their organizations when you have organizations that lack employee loyalty.”