Nice guys don’t get ahead in the workplace when it comes to getting paid. Women don’t either in general, but if they are also a bit argumentative, they also make a bit more than their counterparts. In fact, men with disagreeable personalities out earn men with agreeable personalities by about 18% and women out earn the nice girl by 5%. Turns out how nice you are is also based on some level of genetics.

Timothy Judge of the University of Notre Dames’ Mendoza College of Business said:

“Women who appear to be tough or disagreeable get a special kind of scorn directed toward them. That sort of neutralizes the benefit that they might otherwise receive from their toughness. Can one become firm and assertive in what one wants but not be seen as aggressive? Women probably have to attend more to not just what they ask for but how they ask for it.”

The meaning of workplace behavior is the pattern of actions and interactions of the members of an organization that directly or indirectly affects its effectiveness.

So what does being “agreeable” really mean? Agreeableness is defined as a tendency toward warmth, kindness and cooperation. It’s also one of the basic personality traits discovered by scientists to have a strong genetic basis. About half of the variation between people’s agreeableness is controlled by genes.

Judge continues that warmth and cooperation would seem to be beneficial traits in the workplace, but earlier studies had found that, on the contrary, agreeableness is not associated with career success.

To do a deeper dive, Judge pulled data from three large studies of Americans over time: the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, the National Survey of Midlife Development and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey. Almost 3,500 people were included in the final analysis, from workers just out of school to employees in their 70s. The researchers controlled for factors such as education and job complexity that could skew the results.

Across all three studies, people who scored high in disagreeableness earned more than agreeable types. Men who were disagreeable earned 18.31% more than agreeable men, a difference that translated to an average of $9,772 a year more for the people in the surveys. Disagreeable women out earned agreeable women by 5.47%, an average difference of only $1,828 per year.

To find out why disagreeableness seems beneficial to men in particular, Judge and his colleagues asked 460 undergraduates to read profiles of eight female job promotion candidates or eight male candidates. In either case, half of the job candidates were painted as agreeable, while the other half were disagreeable.

The study found that disagreeable men were more likely to be recommended for promotion than disagreeable women. Study participants indicated they saw disagreeable men as strong leaders, an advantage they didn’t find in disagreeable women.

One of the greatest challenges facing managers and leaders is to understand people’s motives. If we know why people do the things they do we can develop greater understanding, better relationships at work, a happier environment and improved individual, team and organizational performance. This, of course, leads to bottom-line benefits overall.

Written by Sy Kraft