Is Willy Right When He Tells His Sons to be Well-Liked?

 Throughout the parts of Death of a Salesman that I've read so far, Willy repeatedly uses the phrase "well liked" in order to describe the charisma that he believes is necessary for material success. Biff is complimented using this phrase as Willy repeatedly offers questionable advice to his children despite his lack of success. Perhaps Willy is not a reliable narrator, as he can't even distinguish between his flashbacks and the present. However, does Willy have a point when he says "be liked and you'll never want?"

To be or not to be? (well liked)

Past a baseline level of general niceness and competence, i.e. not punching everyone you meet, there are quite a few famous leaders in business who were not liked by their subordinates. Although Elon Musk literally called a British diver "pedo guy" for criticizing his minisub, he is still the richest man in the world, and Tesla's stock price barely dipped after the comment. Steve Jobs was known for randomly firing employees and using witty and cruel insults that are to profane for me to put in this blog. Despite the fact that Willy claims that he's a "big shot" because he's well liked, there is little evidence of this, as he is forced to work solely on commission and eventually fired. To quote Howard: "business is business."

While searching for scientific evidence so that this blog post doesn't become a pile of generalizations and anecdotes about possible outliers, I used the OCEAN trait of agreeableness to approximate the quality of being "well liked." Though the traits are not perfect analogues, I thought that using agreeableness, which includes qualities such as kindness and cooperativeness, to approximate being well liked would yield fairly accurate results. It turns out that agreeableness is the only personality trait that is linked to income; people with low agreeableness tend to make $20000 more on average than people with high agreeableness, so Willy is wrong about popularity as a prerequisite for financial success. This might not trouble people with high agreeableness, since they tend to care less about wealth. It also makes me feel better about having low agreeableness.