How to get ahead in the office? Don’t hog the limelight, or be a wall flower

We all want to get ahead in our career. But how do we do that? Some say occupying certain positions in the company helps. Others point to having the right personality as the key.

To better understand why people do well at work and experience career advancement, my research colleagues and I examined over 137 studies previously conducted to assess the relationships among position in the company, personality, job performance and career success.

Besides the formal relationships we see in an organisational chart, there are a multitude of interactions in the workplace – informal networking that can offer individuals of selected positions benefits including access to critical resources as well as opportunities to connect with different groups of people for future undertakings.

Personality characteristics often influence who gets to occupy these advantageous network positions.

Of the six personality characteristics that we examined – extraversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism and self-monitoring – the personality trait of self-monitoring stands out as a key influencer. Self-monitoring refers to the degree to which people regulate and control how they present themselves in social settings and interpersonal relationships.

We found that high self-monitoring individuals are more likely to occupy advantageous network positions because they know how to present themselves in social settings to get others to like them.