Your boss has plans for a new product and wants your opinion. You'll probably get promoted. Actors and politicians, he says, seem to be the prototypical chameleons. He had that wonderful gift for feeling your pain. He would leave audiences with the impression he really understood them.
Politicians listen carefully to the context of a situation, and they talk that language.
They're very good at making sure people hear what they want to hear. That ability, Kilduff thought, would translate into real benefits for resilient Mr. Ripley-types. To test the theory, Kilduff and colleagues Ajay Mehra from the University of Cincinnati and Daniel Brass from the University of Kentucky studied 116 employees of a small, high-tech firm. The researchers looked at the friendship networks and workflow patterns in the company and asked supervisors to rate the performance of underlings. The chameleons came out on top, as Kilduff and his colleagues had suspected.