Kindness is in the air. Publishers produce business books with titles like “The Power of Nice” or, simply, “Kind”. LinkedIn, which is ostensibly a networking site for career-minded professionals, is overrun with sickly videos showing people being improbably generous to the homeless. Firms publicly embrace the values of compassion: one manufacturer of safety-gear talks of “offering grace internally”, which sounds terribly intrusive.
The fashion for niceness is both trite and revealing. Trite, because it is really not surprising that people respond well to decent behaviour from colleagues and bosses. It would take a brave author to write a book called “Stand Up for Psychopathy” or “Three Cheers for the Dark Triad”. Revealing, because it shows how the leadership pendulum has swung.
A recent meta-analysis of research into niceness and effective leadership, by Andrew Blake of Texas Tech University and his co-authors, concludes that the two do often go together. Studies into bosses’ agreeableness, one of the “Big Five” personality traits (along with openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion and neuroticism), have found that it is tied to ethical behaviour, workplace trust and psychological safety, among other beneficial things.
That, in turn, can improve aspects of a firm’s performance. A recent paper by Charles O’Reilly of Stanford University and his co-authors looked at the relationship between chief executives’ personalities and reviews of their organisations’ culture on Glassdoor, an employee-ratings website. Agreeable bosses were associated with cultures that were more collaborative and innovative.
Niceness seems to matter more than it once did. A meta-analysis of research ending in the late 1990s did not find evidence of a strong connection between agreeableness and effective leadership. Some of this shift doubtless reflects the way organisations have evolved: teams matter more, along with the social skills that ease co-operation. Some of it may also reflect more volatility in the outside world. A study by Soo Ling Lim of University College London and her co-authors looked at the performance of MBA students at London Business School across ten academic years, and found that agreeableness improves outcomes when levels of uncertainty about a task—and presumably, the need to work together harmoniously—are higher.
It is progress to get away from the era of “nice guys finish last”, not least for those people who aren’t guys: women have long suffered more from perceptions of lower competence if they display warmth. But you can have too much of anything, even kindness.
Agreeableness is not the only trait that matters for a boss: a delightful but highly neurotic person may struggle in stressful situations. Employees vary too: some people care less about empathy and more about money. There are moments—when employees have suffered a personal trauma, for example—when warmth is the most important test of a company’s character. But in other circumstances, different traits matter.
People who score less well on agreeableness are liable to be less trusting, more competitive and more confrontational. That may not recommend them as friends but could well be an advantage in certain contexts. Mr O’Reilly’s paper finds, for example, that different industries attract leaders with varying personality types: bosses in the financial-services industry are comparatively less agreeable, for example, than those who work in health care. Kindness may also count for less in negotiation-heavy roles like sales.
A recent paper by Daniel Keum and Nandil Bhatia of Columbia Business School looks at how changing economic conditions can affect the types of bosses who lead firms. The researchers gauge chief executives’ “prosociality” (their concern for the welfare of others) by looking at things like their charitable activities and their language on earnings calls. Prosocial bosses can be slower to restructure firms in bad times, and the authors find that during periods of intensifying competition they were more likely to be replaced by less caring types. When layoffs are necessary, boards don’t want Samaritans in charge.
What there is no excuse for is unkindness. There is a basic level of decency, civility and courtesy to which everyone is entitled and from which all organisations benefit. Kindness is not a management doctrine. But its absence is a management failure. ■
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