Being agreeable at work may not be agreeable to your wallet.

I found an article today stating that agreeable employees make significantly less money than their counterparts who tend to disagree more- 18% higher pay for men who disagree more at work and 5% higher pay for women who disagree more at work.  WOW!  Quoting from the article:

“The problem is, many managers often don’t realize they reward disagreeableness … You can say this is what you value as a company, but your compensation system may not really reflect that, especially if you leave compensation decisions to individual managers.”

So, where does that leave you?  Depending on where you already fall in that spectrum of agreeableness, do you need to alter your current work style?  What will the reprocussions be if you go from being “Mr. Agreeable” to being “Mr. Disagreeable”?  My guess is that if you fall into the underpaid-and-overly-agreeable-work-ethic group, you need to start making small changes to remedy your situation.  You can’t just jump sides all at once, but you also don’t want to sit on the sidelines and get paid less for agreeing to do more work.  

Another thing to consider is where you work… different companies breed different cultures and reward different attributes.   You may work for a company whose culture rewards your agreeableness and all the world is right.  For those of us who are not “living the dream” and getting paid for what we do, the time is now to start making changes and getting a better balance between being agreeable and being paid fairly.

What do you see among the culture of your company, or past company?