Category: Research

Research: Which skills result in increased salary/career success

LessWrong.com has an interesting article about a study of what skills/tactics correlate with higher salaries. Specifically, the authors analyzed 200 studies of career success and their causes, and tried to figure out what skills have the highest correlation with higher salaries.

According to the article, here is what results in highest chances of success:

  • Find managers (or other seniors) who will “sponsor” you (i.e. take an interest in advancing your career)
  • Be politically savvy
  • Convincing people with rational arguments works better than lying to them
  • Flattery works (especially if the target does not realize you’re trying to flatter them; but even when the target realizes it)
  • Act modest
  • Avoid blatant self-promotion

Here are some interesting excerpts which give interesting data-points and actual numbers from the study:

Ng et al. performed a metastudy of over 200 individual studies of objective and subjective career success. Here are the variables they found best correlated with salary:

 

Predictor

Correlation

Political Knowledge & Skills

0.29

Education Level

0.29

Cognitive Ability (as measured by standardized tests)

0.27

Age

0.26

Training and Skill Development Opportunities

0.24

Hours Worked

0.24

Career Sponsorship

0.22

(all significant at p = .05)


(For reference, the “Big 5” personality traits all have a correlation under 0.12.)

Before you get carried away, remember this:

Before we go on, a few caveats: while these correlations are significant and important, none are overwhelming (the authors cite Cohen as saying the range 0.24-0.36 is “medium” and correlations over 0.37 are “large”).

This table gives an idea of which tactics work best for career success. Higher numbers are good. Lower numbers indicate that those tactics don’t really work. Negative numbers indicate that those tactics will actually hurt your chances.

Recently, Higgins et al. reviewed 23 individual studies of these tactics and how they relate to career success. Their results:

 

Tactic

Correlation

Definition (From Higgins et al.)

Rationality

0.26

Using data and information to make a logical argument supporting one’s request

Ingratiation

0.23

Using behaviors designed to increase the target’s liking of oneself or to make oneself appear friendly in order to get what one wants

Upward Appeal

0.05

Relying on the chain of command, calling in superiors to help get one’s way

Self-Promotion

0.01

Attempting to create an appearance of competence or that you are capable

of completing a task

Assertiveness

-0.02

Using a forceful manner to get what one wants

Exchange

-0.03

Making an explicit offer to do something for another in exchange for their doing what

one wants

(Only ingratiation and rationality are significant.)

This site has a lot of information on how to make rational appeals, so I will focus on the less-talked-about ingratiation techniques.

So, modesty is good, self-promotion is bad. Here are details of how to present yourself:

Self-presentation is split further:

 

Tactic

Weighted Effect Size

Comment

Modesty

0.77

Apology

0.59

Apologizing for poor performance

Generic

0.28

 When the participant is told in generic terms to improve their self-presentation

Self-promotion

-0.17

Nonverbal behavior and name usage

-0.14

Nonverbal behavior includes things like wearing perfume. Name usage means referring to people by name instead of a pronoun.

And finally some more details about flattery:

If you are talking to your boss, your tactics should be different than if you’re talking to a subordinate. Other-enhancement (flattery) is always the best tactic no matter who you’re talking to, but when talking to superiors it’s by far the best. When talking to those at similar levels to you, opinion conformity comes close to flattery, and the other techniques aren’t far behind.

 

Unsurprisingly, when the target realizes you’re being ingratiating, the tactic is less effective. (Although effectiveness doesn’t go to zero – even when people realize you’re flattering them just to suck up, they generally still appreciate it.) Also, women are better at being ingratiating than men, and men are more influenced by these ingratiating tactics than women.

Read the full article, it has a bunch of interesting references that the motivated reader is urged to read.

More information and openness is not always a good thing – via @TimHarford

Tim Harford has an interesting article on the murkier side of transparency – i.e. how more information is not always better.

For example, he talks about how Toronto installed countdown timers at various traffic signals, giving pedestrians an idea of how many seconds they have to cross the road. Since they installed these signals on only some intersections and not others, some researchers used this opportunity to study the impact of the timers on the accident rate.

Their findings:

You might well anticipate that the countdowns would make junctions less dangerous, by telling pedestrians whether or not they have time to cross in safety. Toronto’s traffic planners certainly seemed to believe that would be the case. They were wrong. The new signals caused more accidents.

How is this possible? Here is the suggested explanation:

If a signal is about to turn red for pedestrians crossing at a junction, then drivers who are trying to get across the junction in the same direction are also about to get a red light. Since there was more speeding and more rear-end collisions after the countdown signals were installed, Kapoor and Magesan reckon the natural explanation is that some drivers were accelerating into the junction to avoid being delayed, just as other drivers were slowing down.

This idea, that more information can actually hurt, shows up in other places too. Here is an example of a study conducted on hospitals which insisted that success rates of individual doctors/surgeons be published.

Ten years ago, David Dranove, Daniel Kessler, Mark McClellan and Mark Satterthwaite looked at the impact of mandatory “report cards” in New York and Pennsylvania, which published data on the performance of individual doctors, hospitals or both.

One might imagine that this information would, at the very least, be convenient. At best it should spur physicians to improve their skills because patients would seek out the very best. But the researchers looked at the impact on cardiac surgery, and found a tragic side effect: once doctors and hospitals knew that their success rates would be published, they had a strong incentive to operate on the healthiest patients. The best hospitals had their pick of the sick and selected easy cases. Meanwhile patients with more complicated conditions were more likely to have surgery postponed. The net result: more money was spent, yet more people died of heart attacks.

In other words, sometimes it pays to make information available only selectively:

Publishing clear information is often a way to make the world a better place – but not always. Sometimes it pays to be selective. Doctors could benefit from report cards, provided their patients never find out what they said. And Toronto’s countdown signals would work perfectly if only they could be hidden from drivers.

Read the full article

Why Diversity Pays – Diverse groups tend to make more sensible decisions

Tim Harford has an interesting article where he has collected together data from various sources indicating that groups that carve out space for different perspectives tend to make more sensible decisions.

Here are some excerpts from the article:

In the Journal of Financial Economics, Renée Adams and Daniel Ferreira found that female directors seemed to provide better oversight, and to inspire their male colleagues to do likewise. In the Financial Review, David Carter, Betty Simkins and W Gary Simpson found a correlation between firm value and diversity on the board.

and, according to a study, of trades by female company directors, that looked at tens of thousands of trades in UK companies from 1994 to 2006,

fund managers should be paying more attention to what female directors do.

Why? Because they make more money when they buy shares. On a medium-term timescale, from three months to a year, their trades outperform those of their male counterparts.

Read the full article