'Highly skilled, social individuals achieve more'

If you are smart and can also play well with others, you are more likely to reach the highest rungs on the corporate ladder than those who have just one quality -- either book-smart or socially adept, says a new study.

Individuals who reach the highest rungs on the corporate ladder are both smart and social, the findings showed.

"The people who are both smart and socially adept earn more in today's workforce than similarly endowed workers in 1980," said economist Catherine Weinberger from University of California, Santa Barbara in the US.

Individuals today, who possess one skill or the other, are doing about as well as those in the past.

"In 1980, there was no additional benefit to having both skills... today there is," she added.

"Every 10 years or so, the U.S. government surveys a representative sample of high school students and has them take tests. Then they follow these people for about 10 years to know how they're doing in the labour market when they reach their late 20s," Weinberger explained.

The researcher had been using those data sets to examine the relationship between being a leader in high school and being in high demand in the job market later on.

"Just making students sit down and learn math and trying to get their test scores up is not enough," Weinberger noted.

The findings appeared online in the journal Review of Economics and Statistics.