Using Game Theory a Harvard study has come to the pleasant conclusion that nice guys do finish first. However it comes with a caveat -- only in the long run and only in situations where equals are involved.
In the long run the nice guy may give up being nice, or may be finished. Also, this study does not seem to correlate with the dominant paradigm I have seen in the professional / corporate world -- which tends to reward fire-spitting, angry, get-my-work-done type personalities. Normally the boss-employee relationship does not anyway involve equals. But even between peers there is competition and some people tend to put their names/faces before their peers' or manipulate circumstances to goldplate an achievement as *mainly* an outcome of their intelligence / hardwork.
The Harvard study focused on 100 Boston-area football players:
Playing the same game over and over — a punishment-heavy version of the classic one-on-one brinksmanship game of prisoner's dilemma...Common game theory has held that punishment makes two equals cooperate. But when people compete in repeated games, punishment fails to deliver, said study author Martin Nowak.
..."On the individual level, we find that those who use punishments are the losers," Nowak said his experiments found.
Those who escalate the conflict very often wound up doomed.
...The study looked at games between equals. Punishment does seem to have a place in games when one player is dominant and needs to enforce submission, Nowak said.
