Should you be nice at work?

Kindness is in vogue.

- 

Kindness is in the air. Publishers produce business books with titles like The Power Of Nice or, simply, Kind. LinkedIn, which is ostensibly a networking site for career-minded professionals, is overrun with sickly videos showing people being improbably generous to the homeless. Firms publicly embrace the values of compassion: one manufacturer of safety gear talks of "offering grace internally", which sounds terribly intrusive.

The fashion for niceness is both trite and revealing. Trite, because it is really not surprising that people respond well to decent behaviour from colleagues and bosses. It would take a brave author to write a book called Stand Up For Psychopathy or Three Cheers For The Dark Triad. Revealing, because it shows how the leadership pendulum has swung.

A recent meta-analysis of research into niceness and effective leadership, by Assistant Professor Andrew Blake of Texas Tech University and his co-authors, concludes that the two do often go together. Studies into bosses' agreeableness, one of the "Big Five" personality traits (along with openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion and neuroticism), have found that it is tied to ethical behaviour, workplace trust and psychological safety, among other beneficial things.