- | 9:00 am
Does being nice hurt your career?
New research looks at whether niceness really impacts your success.
Weāve all heard the saying, āNice guys finish last,ā but is it true? WhileĀ past research tended to back up the adage, Rong Su, associate professor of management and entrepreneurship at the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business, decided toĀ retest the concept. She and her fellow researchers discovered there is a nuance to niceness that impacts your success.
āThe assumption is, if youāre being nice, youāre not competitive, you do not perform well, and you do not advance in your career as much as others,ā says Su. āWe set out to challenge this assumption.ā
THE NUANCES OF NICENESS
Su found that there are different forms of niceness. For example, nice can refer to someone whoās compliant to others and not competitive or assertive. This is a negative type of niceness, and it can harm your career progression.
āThis personality trait is someone who is kind, empathetic, and always complying to the requests of others,ā says Su. āTheyāre also conflict-avoidant in meetings. This type of niceness is not helpful.ā
But niceness also can mean being socially motivated, which is having a strong desire to help others.
āWe all have colleagues who are willing to help and step in when a coworker is sick,ā says Su. āThey volunteer and want to benefit others through their work. We found having a strong prosocial motivation has benefits across the board for a lot of different types of outcomes for employees.ā
THE BENEFITS
According to Suās research, people who have a high prosocial motivation (a social science term, coined to mean the opposite of āantisocialā) are generally happier, they have high psychological well-being, and, most importantly, they have stronger job performance.
āThey have stronger career success in terms of being evaluated,ā she says. āAnd they are considered to have more leadership potential by their peers and coworkers, giving them a greater chance to advance to management positions.ā
However, being prosocially motivated does not mean that you must be altruistic, sacrificing your own workflow or goals to help. āThey donāt have to help at the cost of completing their own job tasks because that would cause their performance to decrease,ā says Su.
BUILDING PROSOCIAL TRAITS
Being prosocially motivated isnāt necessarily something youāre born with, says Su. āSome people do have a stronger tendency naturally, but social motivation can be embedded in a work context with specific target beneficiaries,ā she says. āFor example, you can be motivated to benefit clients or benefit coworkers. These types of social motivation have the strongest positive impact on someoneās job performance, compared to the global level prosocial motivation where someone wants to be helpful in general.ā
While it can be a personality tendency, Su says it also can be learned and encouraged at an organizational level. For example, companies can look for the trait when screening job candidates. Su suggests asking scenario-based questions during an interview that reveal the personās values and how they see themselves fitting in at their organization. For example, āTell me about a situation when a coworker needed help. What did you do, and how did you balance your own workload?ā
Prosocial motivation can be built into a culture. āIt takes a lot of like policies and systems,ā says Su. āA company that wants to be overly competitive endorses individual achievement instead of prosocial behavior. In this case, they can reevaluate their values.ā
Another way to build social motivation into a culture is to bake it into performance reviews, calling out times when an employee helped a coworker or customer. āA lot of companies evaluate employeesā productivity and performance based on individual things like how many sales calls they made,ā says Su. āThey can also build into the evaluation someoneās social behavior, such as to what extent this person contributes to the team above and beyond their individual accomplishments and contributions. Giving feedback on how to change and meet those goals is another way to encourage motivation.ā
Suās study found that gender doesnāt impact the positive benefits of being prosocially motivated. āYou often hear stories about [how] women are expected to be prosocial, and if youāre prosocial people are not going to appreciate you,ā she says. āWe found that men and women benefit equally from the trait. Men and women can leverage the positive performance benefits and the benefits for career success by being prosocial.ā