Kill chaos with kindness: why agreeableness pays

In today’s environment, decisions increasingly have to be made with incomplete information and no certainty about what happens next. Technology is changing faster than many organisations can keep up with. Job security is low in many places, political systems are unstable, and the effects of climate change are becoming harder to ignore.

How does uncertainty change what makes a team effective? That question sits at the heart of my study Kill chaos with kindness: Agreeableness improves team performance under uncertainty, which I published with my co-authors in March 2023.

As a researcher, it’s rare to see something coming down the road and then watch it become the thing. That's what happened here. The research has become more relevant with time as uncertainty has become less of an occasional disruption and more of a feature of organisational life.

The research began when Soo Ling Lim, Honorary Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University College London, approached me with an idea. She wanted to use computer simulation to model how personality shapes team performance, but needed the data to do it. I had access to a unique 10-year dataset covering hundreds of teams and thousands of London Business School MBA students.

The simulation initially confirmed much of what previous research had already shown, including that traits such as extraversion and conscientiousness can help teams perform and neuroticism makes decision making less effective. The surprise came when uncertainty was introduced into the model.

At the centre of the study was agreeableness – one of the "Big Five" personality traits, alongside neuroticism, extraversion, openness and conscientiousness. For years, several of those traits had been reliably linked to team performance. Agreeableness was the outlier: its relationship with performance appeared inconsistent, sometimes significant, often not. The dataset gave us a way to understand why.

It included teams tackling problems in subjects such as finance, economics and accounting, where there tends to be a right or wrong answer, alongside tasks in strategy and organisational behaviour, where there may be better and worse answers, but rarely a single correct one. That allowed us to look at what happened to the relationship between personality and performance when uncertainty entered the picture.

Teams with higher average agreeableness performed better on tasks involving uncertainty. This challenged a long-standing assumption in management selection. Agreeableness had largely been treated as a nice-to-have. The research suggests that view is mistaken. As the environment becomes less predictable, agreeableness becomes increasingly important to performance. In addition, people low on agreeableness (i.e., those inclined to say there is only one logical and correct answer) are likely to become increasingly unproductive.

It's worth being precise about what agreeableness actually means. At its simplest, it is wanting to get along with other people and wanting them to get along with each other. It's an instinct to collaborate, cooperate and engage. That's different from simply being nice. Nice can mean being a doormat.

Collaborative leadership is still sometimes mistaken for weak leadership. Take the debate over bringing people back into the office. A leader can insist that people come in because they genuinely believe the team collaborates more effectively in the same room. That can fit perfectly well with agreeableness. Being agreeable doesn't mean never making demands of people.

What doesn't fit is insulting or intimidating people to get them to do things. That causes people to disengage and walk away. Leadership research over the last hundred years is pretty clear on this: that behaviour has a very short time window. It may cut through in the moment, but it doesn't help you over the longer term.

The same problem appears in the way leaders approach judgement calls. A more categorical, “it's-my-way-or-the-highway” style might have worked well enough when running a business was more straightforward. Companies today, however, are constantly having to test, experiment and iterate, often without knowing in advance what will work.

A closed, right-answer/wrong-answer mindset doesn't work well in that environment. It blurs the distinction between fact and judgement, treating everything as a yes-or-no call even when it isn't. And when a problem doesn't have one right answer, shutting out other people's perspectives leaves you making decisions with less information than you could have had.

So why should agreeableness improve performance? When there isn't one right answer, talking to other people becomes more valuable. Highly agreeable people are more inclined to test their thinking with others: Does this make sense? What am I missing? What are you seeing that I'm not?

The more uncertain the problem, the less likely it is that any one person has all the information needed to solve it. Bringing different perspectives gives you more interaction with the reality of what's actually going on.

The trade-off is that listening takes time. If people feel they have something to say, and you genuinely encourage them to say it, decision-making will take longer. There isn't really any way around that. If the only measure of efficiency is how quickly a decision gets made, collaboration can look inefficient.

What you lose in the speed of making the decision, however, you can gain back in implementation. Once people have been involved and the decision has been tested against different perspectives, you can get to the endpoint at least as quickly as when somebody simply jams a decision through from the top. The quality also tends to be better because the decision has had more interaction with the reality of what's happening on the ground.

The business case for agreeableness ultimately comes down to performance: making better decisions and then being able to execute them.

There are signs that the profile of leaders progressing through organisations is changing. I teach personality extensively, which over time gives me an interesting window into the executives coming through the classroom. Before Covid-19, on an agreeableness scale from zero to 100, with 50 right in the middle, the executives coming into the classroom would typically average somewhere around 35 to 45. Today, I'm seeing 55, 60, sometimes even 65.

That's not a controlled experiment, and it doesn't prove that being agreeable gets you promoted. But the change is hard to ignore. Organisations generally promote people who get things done. The executives now reaching the classroom – people who have been successful enough to progress within their organisations – are considerably more agreeable than the cohorts that came before them. The change was already happening slowly, but the pandemic seems to have accelerated it, and the direction has continued since.

Many of the problems leaders face involve competing priorities and information scattered across an organisation. If there is a clean right answer, you should find it. But when there isn't one, organisations need people willing to test their judgement against what other people know. Agreeableness gives people that instinct.

That may make the conversation before a decision take a little longer, but if the result is faster implementation and a better-quality decision, that isn't softness. And it certainly isn't kindness for kindness's sake. It's what it means to kill chaos with kindness – and why, in an uncertain world, agreeableness pays.