Why do some leaders use their position to amass personal prestige and resources, and others to benefit the team, the organization, or society? This article synthesizes new, cross-disciplinary ...research showing that self-serving leader behavior is predictable based on the function and nature of power—an essential component of leadership. First, because power increases goal-oriented behavior, it amplifies the tendency of self-focused goals to yield self-interested behavior. Self-focused goals may arise from a variety of sources; evidence is reviewed for the role of traits (e.g., low agreeableness), values (e.g., self-enhancement), self-construal (e.g., independence), and motivation (e.g., personalized power motivation). Second, because power is generally desirable, leaders whose power is threatened (e.g., self-doubts, positional instability) will turn their focus to maintaining that power—even at others’ expense. These ideas have important implications for research and for organizational efforts to develop leaders who will improve others’ outcomes rather than merely benefit themselves.
Previous research suggests that women, more than men, experience negative outcomes when they display dominance. A closer look, however, reveals ambiguity about the specific forms of dominance ...proscribed for women. Here, we suggest that negative reactions to women's dominance, a counter-stereotypical behavior, may require that the behavior be clearly encoded as counter-stereotypical-which is less likely when the behavior is expressed implicitly. This hypothesis was tested with a meta-analysis of studies on the evaluation of individuals behaving dominantly, including articles not directly investigating gender. Results revealed that dominance indeed hurts women's, relative to men's, likability (although the overall effect is small, d = −0.19, k = 63), as well as more downstream outcomes such as hireability (d = −0.58, k = 20). More important, however, dominance expressed explicitly (e.g., direct demands) affected women's likability (d = −0.28) whereas implicit forms of dominance (e.g., eye contact) did not (d = 0.03). Finally, the effect of dominance on men's and women's perceived competence did not differ (d = 0.02, k = 31), consistent with the idea that it is interpersonal (rather than instrumental) evaluations that obstruct women leaders. Implications for theory, and for the success of male and female leaders, are discussed.
Does fair political representation for historically disadvantaged groups require their presence in legislative bodies? The intuition that women are best represented by women, and African-Americans by ...other African-Americans, has deep historical roots. Yet the conception of fair representation that prevails in American political culture and jurisprudence--what Melissa Williams calls "liberal representation"--concludes that the social identity of legislative representatives does not bear on their quality as representatives. Liberal representation's slogan, "one person, one vote, " concludes that the outcome of the electoral and legislative process is fair, whatever it happens to be, so long as no voter is systematically excluded. Challenging this notion, Williams maintains that fair representation is powerfully affected by the identity of legislators and whether some of them are actually members of the historically marginalized groups that are most in need of protection in our society.Williams argues first that the distinctive voice of these groups should be audible within the legislative process. Second, she holds that the self-representation of these groups is necessary to sustain their trust in democratic institutions. The memory of state-sponsored discrimination against these groups, together with ongoing patterns of inequality along group lines, provides both a reason to recognize group claims and a way of distinguishing stronger from weaker claims. The book closes by proposing institutions that can secure fair representation for marginalized groups without compromising principles of democratic freedom and equality.
The present
studies demonstrate that conceiving of racial group membership as biologically
determined increases acceptance of racial inequities (Studies 1 and 2) and cools
interest in interacting ...with racial outgroup members (Studies 3-5).
These effects were generally independent of racial prejudice. It is argued that
when race is cast as a biological marker of individuals, people perceive racial
outgroup members as unrelated to the self and therefore unworthy of attention
and affiliation. Biological conceptions of race therefore provide justification
for a racially inequitable status quo and for the continued social
marginalization of historically disadvantaged groups.
Since the publication of Peng and Nisbett’s seminal paper on dialectical thinking, a substantial amount of empirical research has replicated and expanded on the core finding that people differ in the ...degree to which they view the world as inherently contradictory and in constant flux. Dialectical thinkers (who are more often members of East Asian than Western cultures) show greater expectation of change in tasks related to explanation and prediction and greater tolerance of contradiction in tasks involving the reconciliation of contradictory information. The authors show how these effects are manifested in the domains of the self, emotional experience, psychological well-being, attitudes and evaluations, social categorization and perception, and judgment and decision making. They note important topics in need of further investigation and offer predictions concerning possible cultural differences in unexplored domains as a function of the presence or absence of naïve dialecticism.
Previous theorists have characterized sexually aggressive behavior as an expression of power, yet evidence that power causes sexual aggression is mixed. We hypothesize that power can indeed create ...opportunities for sexual aggression-but that it is those who chronically experience low power who will choose to exploit such opportunities. Here, low-power men placed in a high-power role showed the most hostility in response to a denied opportunity with an attractive woman (Studies 1 and 2). Chronically low-power men and women given acute power were the most likely to say they would inappropriately pursue an unrequited workplace attraction (Studies 3 and 4). Finally, having power over an attractive woman increased harassment behavior among men with chronic low, but not high, power (Study 5). People who see themselves as chronically denied power appear to have a stronger desire to feel powerful and are more likely to use sexual aggression toward that end.
Destigmatization is an understudied social process in which the negative outcomes for a previously stigmatized group improve. We theorize that during a period of destigmatization, the effects of ...stigma persist more strongly for people stigmatized by association than for those directly stigmatized. We propose that this occurs because, during periods of destigmatization, conscious prejudice has diminished but nonconscious prejudice remains, so people correct for their explicit biases toward individuals with the stigmatizing trait but are unaware of their ongoing implicit prejudice toward those stigmatized by association. Our evidence comes from archival data on individual employment in film during the cold war years in Hollywood. It shows that as the stigma of being on an anticommunist blacklist weakened, the employment penalty for being a coworker of a blacklisted artist was greater than the penalty for actually having been on the blacklist itself. A supplemental experiment, designed to address the limitations of archival data, shows the same imbalanced employment penalties in another stigma currently undergoing destigmatization (that of physical disability). Paradoxically, as stigmas recede, harmful effects persist more for associates of stigmatized individuals than for the stigmatized themselves.
This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, organizations.
Despite strong initial interest, college students-especially those from underrepresented minority (URM) backgrounds-leave STEM majors at high rates. Here, we explore the role of racial phenotypic ...stereotypicality, or how typical one's physical appearance is of one's racial group, in STEM persistence. In a longitudinal study, URM students were especially likely to leave STEM to the extent that they looked more stereotypical of their group; Asian American students were especially likely to leave STEM to the extent that they looked less stereotypical. Three experiments documented a possible mechanism; participants (Studies 2-4), including college advisors (Study 3), attributed greater STEM ability to more-stereotypical Asian Americans and to less-stereotypical Black women (not men), than to same-race peers. Study 4 showed that prejudice concerns, activated in interactions with Black men (not women), account for this gender difference; more-stereotypical Black men (like women) were negatively evaluated when prejudice concerns were not salient. This work has important implications for ongoing efforts to achieve diversity in STEM.
Not Yet Human Goff, Phillip Atiba; Eberhardt, Jennifer L; Williams, Melissa J ...
Journal of personality and social psychology,
02/2008, Letnik:
94, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Historical representations explicitly depicting Blacks as apelike have largely disappeared in the United States, yet a mental association between Blacks and apes remains. Here, the authors ...demonstrate that U.S. citizens implicitly associate Blacks and apes. In a series of laboratory studies, the authors reveal how this association influences study participants' basic cognitive processes and significantly alters their judgments in criminal justice contexts. Specifically, this Black-ape association alters visual perception and attention, and it increases endorsement of violence against Black suspects. In an archival study of actual criminal cases, the authors show that news articles written about Blacks who are convicted of capital crimes are more likely to contain ape-relevant language than news articles written about White convicts. Moreover, those who are implicitly portrayed as more apelike in these articles are more likely to be executed by the state than those who are not. The authors argue that examining the subtle persistence of specific historical representations such as these may not only enhance contemporary research on dehumanization, stereotyping, and implicit processes but also highlight common forms of discrimination that previously have gone unrecognized.
