When People Would Rather Work with Competent Jerks Than Likable Fools

If you’re building a baseball team, you don’t care whether a player is nice — you want to know if he can hit the ball. If you’re looking for a surgeon, you don’t ask about personality.

-- Jeffrey Pfeffer

You can fill a room with studies on leadership that hail the importance of being a likable, honest, caring, and modest boss.

In the work world, however, that’s not what people want most. When people have a chance to choose whom to work with, and their own success depends in part on those people, a new study finds that cold competence becomes more important and likability less so.

When money is on the line, in other words, most people would rather work for a very competent jerk than a nice but less competent boss.

Source: https://goo.gl/2xmoJn