Talent & Workforce Intelligence · Article 2 of 6
The Nice Trap
Two studies say agreeable leaders perform better. A third says the same trait can cost them a decade of raises. Both are true, and the gap between them is where hospital leadership actually lives.
PSYNET GROUP · New York based · Global Reach
Psynet Group Insights · 5 minute read · Article 2 of a 6-part series
Warmth and discipline are two scales, not one.
The case for nice
Warmth that teams can feel
Agreeable leaders build trust and cohesive teams that outperform on collaboration.
The case against nice
Feedback that never arrives
Agreeableness correlates with lower earnings and a reluctance to deliver hard feedback.
Tender but tough
Both, held at once
The executives who last score moderate on warmth and hold the line when it counts.
The failure isn’t picking the wrong end of one scale. It’s assuming there’s only one scale to pick from.
The traits that predict which leaders can hold both at once rarely show up in a resume or a panel interview.
Last issue introduced a finding that surprised almost every recruiter who read it: the best hospital executives land in the moderate range on warmth, not the high range. We called it “Tender but Tough.” This issue picks up that thread and asks a harder question. If warmth helps a leader, why does it also seem to hurt one?
The Case for Nice
Warmth builds trust, and trust is what absorbs a bad week.
Start with the research that argues agreeableness belongs in every leadership model. A meta-analysis by Andrew Blake of Texas Tech University and his co-authors found that agreeable leaders build stronger relationships with their teams and create the kind of cohesion that shows up in performance numbers, not just engagement surveys.
Researchers at University College London reached a similar conclusion in a study titled “Kill Chaos with Kindness”: cooperation and humility predicted team performance better than the shark-like traits a previous generation of executives were coached to project.
None of that should surprise anyone who has worked for a good boss and a bad one. Warmth builds trust, and trust is what lets a team absorb a bad week without falling apart.
The Case Against Nice
A leader who cannot say the hard thing is not being kind.
Now the other half. A 2012 study by Timothy Judge of Notre Dame, Beth Livingston of Cornell, and Charlice Hurst of Western Ontario, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, tracked income against agreeableness across four separate samples. Men who rated themselves as less agreeable earned roughly 18 percent more. The title of the paper asked the question directly: do nice guys really finish last? Their data said: often, yes, at least in the paycheck.
$9,972 Annual earnings gap, less agreeable men | 18% Income premium, lower agreeableness |
Both figures from Judge, Livingston and Hurst (2012), across four samples.
NYU psychologist Tessa West has traced the mechanism. Niceness becomes a problem, she has argued, when it turns into an avoidance of the critical feedback a person actually needs to grow. A leader who cannot bring herself to say the hard thing is not being kind. She is postponing a cost and handing it to someone else, usually a patient, a family, or the coworker left to compensate for what never got corrected.
Why Both Studies Are Right
Two leaders failing on different axes, not the same one measured backwards.
The contradiction dissolves once you stop treating agreeableness as one trait. Our data on hospital executives backs this up directly. Warmth and discipline are not opposite ends of a single scale. They are two separate scales, and a leader can score anywhere on either one independent of the other.
The CNO who cannot deliver a hard performance conversation and the CNO who cannot hold a care team together during a bad shift are failing on different axes, not the same one measured in opposite directions.
What a board should actually ask
- Not “is this person nice enough?”
- Not “is this person tough enough?”
- Can they hold both at once, under pressure, for longer than an interview lasts?
We think about a health system client that promoted from within twice in three years, each time choosing the candidate the search committee described as “a people person.” Both hires struggled with the same failure: neither could bring themselves to end a relationship with a physician group that had stopped performing.
That is the version of “nice” that costs a hospital the most, and it is invisible in a reference check.
Coming Next
Almost none of it shows up before the hire is already made.
Over the next four issues, we will take this apart piece by piece: what the soft failure looks like from the inside, what the cold failure looks like from the inside, what the actual sweet spot looks like in a working executive, and why almost none of it shows up before the hire is already made.
Curious what this looks like for your organization?
Reach out.
I’m happy to walk you through what we’re seeing across the accounts we work with.
Contact [email protected] →Sources
- Blake, A., Luu, S., Petrenko, O., et al. Meta-analysis on agreeableness and leadership effectiveness. walton.uark.edu
- “Kill Chaos with Kindness,” University College London. fortune.com
- Judge, T. A., Livingston, B. A., & Hurst, C. (2012). “Do Nice Guys—and Gals—Really Finish Last? The Joint Effects of Sex and Agreeableness on Income.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. mendoza.nd.edu
- Tessa West (NYU), on niceness and avoidance of critical feedback. fortune.com