Why you need to know this: if you have watched a forceful colleague win the room and the promotion, or wondered whether you come across as too much or too little, this briefing explains what the room is hearing, where it goes wrong, and what changes it.
The loudest person often does rise. Across 97 meta-analyses, studies that pool the results of many earlier studies, extraversion carried a small, persistent advantage at work (Wilmot, Wanberg, Kammeyer-Mueller & Ones, 2019), and in a fourteen-year study extraverts were the most likely to advance, while selfish and combative people were not (Anderson, Sharps, Soto & John, 2020).
Loud is two things. Influence comes through dominance, which people defer to, and prestige, which people admire; both worked in groups, but only prestige made people like them (Cheng, Tracy, Foulsham, Kingstone & Henrich, 2013).
Loud sounds competent. People rated dominant leaders as more competent than their ability supported because they offered more answers, not more correct ones (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009). Listeners preferred leaders with lower voices (Klofstad, Anderson & Peters, 2012), and wanted dominant leaders more when they felt out of control (Kakkar & Sivanathan, 2017).
Not everybody is allowed to be loud. Powerful men talked more; a female chief executive who talked more was rated less competent (Brescoll, 2011).
It stops paying. Colleagues most often cited assertiveness as a weakness, half the time for too much of it, and the most assertive managers were rated worse than those in the middle (Ames & Flynn, 2007). Dominance raised rank early, but only prestige went on raising it (Redhead, Cheng, Driver, Foulsham & O’Gorman, 2019), and dominance-driven leaders sidelined capable members when they felt threatened (Maner & Mead, 2010).
Nobody hears their own volume. About half of people who came across as too assertive or not assertive enough did not know it, and many who got it right thought they had gone too far (Ames & Wazlawek, 2014).
What changes it. Speak early with a reason, make the work visible, check before you retreat, and, if you chair, ask the quiet person first and ask for reasons rather than conclusions.