When the appeal of a dominant leader is greater than a prestige leader

Across the globe we witness the rise of populist authoritarian leaders who are overbearing in their narrative, aggressive in behavior, and often exhibit questionable moral character. Drawing on evolutionary theory of leadership emergence, in which dominance and prestige are seen as dual routes to leadership, we provide a situational and psychological account for when and why dominant leaders are preferred over other respected and admired candidates. We test our hypothesis using three studies, encompassing more than 140,000 participants, across 69 countries and spanning the past two decades. We find robust support for our hypothesis that under a situational threat of economic uncertainty (as exemplified by the poverty rate, the housing vacancy rate, and the unemployment rate) people escalate their support for dominant leaders. Further, we find that this phenomenon is mediated by participants’ psychological sense of a lack of personal control. Together, these results provide large-scale, globally representative evidence for the structural and psychological antecedents that increase the preference for dominant leaders over their prestigious counterparts

Group cohesion benefits individuals who express prejudice, but harms their group

When someone expresses prejudice against an outgroup, how negatively do we judge the prejudiced individual and his or her ingroup? Previous lines of research suggest that the answer depends on the ingroup’s entitativity -- i.e., how cohesive it is -- but they make different predictions about whether entitativity should increase or decrease outside observers’ negative reactions to prejudice. We resolve this tension by demonstrating divergent consequences of entitativity for prejudiced individuals versus their groups. Mediational and experimental data from six studies (two pre-registered; N = 2,455) support two hypotheses: Entitativity increases how responsible the group seems for its member’s prejudice, which in turn decreases how unacceptable observers find the member’s behavior and how much they condemn her (H1), but which also increases how much they condemn the group (H2). Thus, entitativity can grant individuals a license to express prejudice but can damage their group’s reputation

Dispositional antecedents of promotive and prohibitive voice

We propose that promotive voice, or the expression of suggestions for improving work practices in the organization, and prohibitive voice, or the expression of warnings about factors that can harm the organization, are differentially influenced by employees’ dispositional inclination to be approach and avoidance oriented. Drawing on multisource survey data from 291 employees and their managers, we found that approach orientation had positive relationship with promotive voice and negative relationship with prohibitive voice. By contrast, avoidance orientation had positive relationship with prohibitive voice and negative relationship with promotive voice. Further, voice role expectations, or employees’ beliefs about the extent to which a particular form of voice is expected from them in their daily work, moderated the effects of approach and avoidance orientations. Highlighting the unique nature of voice as a behavior that is especially sensitive to situational cues, the effects of approach and avoidance orientations on promotive and prohibitive voice were stronger when role expectations for that form of voice were weaker. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed

The Impact of Leader Dominance on Employees’ Zero-Sum Mindset and Helping Behavior

Leaders strive to encourage helping behaviors among employees, as it positively affects both organizational and team effectiveness. However, the manner in which a leader influences others can unintentionally limit this desired behavior. Drawing on social learning theory, we contend that a leader’s tendency to influence others via dominance could decrease employees’ interpersonal helping. Dominant leaders, who influence others by being assertive and competitive, shape their subordinates’ cognitive schema of success based on zero-sum thinking. Employees with a zero-sum mindset are more likely to believe that they can only make progress at the expense of others. We further propose that this zero-sum mindset results in less interpersonal helping among subordinates. We test our hypotheses by employing different operationalizations of our key variables in eight studies of which four are reported in the manuscript and another four in supplementary information (SI) across a combined sample of 147,780 observations. These studies include a large archival study, experiments with both laboratory and online samples, and a time-lagged field study with employees from 50 different teams. Overall, this research highlights the unintended consequences that dominant leaders have on their followers’ helping behavior by increasing their zero-sum mindset

Barcoding heat shock proteins to human diseases: looking beyond the heat shock response

There are numerous human diseases that are associated with protein misfolding and the formation of toxic protein aggregates. Activating the heat shock response (HSR)--and thus generally restoring the disturbed protein homeostasis associated with such diseases--has often been suggested as a therapeutic strategy. However, most data on activating the HSR or its downstream targets in mouse models of diseases associated with aggregate formation have been rather disappointing. The human chaperonome consists of many more heat shock proteins (HSPs) that are not regulated by the HSR, however, and researchers are now focusing on these as potential therapeutic targets. In this Review, we summarize the existing literature on a set of aggregation diseases and propose that each of them can be characterized or 'barcoded' by a different set of HSPs that can rescue specific types of aggregation. Some of these 'non-canonical' HSPs have demonstrated effectiveness in vivo, in mouse models of protein-aggregation disease. Interestingly, several of these HSPs also cause diseases when mutated--so-called chaperonopathies--which are also discussed in this Review

Consequences of perceiving organization members as a unified entity: Stronger attraction, but greater blame for member transgressions.

Are Uber drivers just a collection of independent workers, or a meaningful part of Uber’s workforce? Do the owners of Holiday Inn franchises around the world seem more like a loosely knit group, or more like a cohesive whole? These questions examine perceptions of organization members’ entitativity, the extent to which individuals appear to comprise a single, unified entity. We propose that the public’s perception that an organization’s members are highly entitative can be a double-edged sword for the organization. On the one hand, perceiving an organization’s members as highly entitative makes the public more attracted to the organization because people associate entitativity with competence. On the other hand, perceiving members as highly entitative leads the public to blame the organization and its leadership for an individual member’s wrongdoing because the public infers that the organization and its leadership tacitly condoned the wrongdoing. Two experiments and a field survey, plus thee supplemental studies, support these propositions. Moving beyond academic debates about whether theories should treat an organization as a unified entity, these results demonstrate the importance of understanding how much the public does perceive an organization as a unified entity. As the changing nature of work enables loosely knit collections of individuals to hold membership in the same organization, entitativity perceptions may become increasingly consequential

Fall from grace: The role of dominance and prestige in the punishment of high-status actors

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the Academy of Management via the DOI in this recordWhen actors transgress social norms, their social status colors the severity with which they are punished. While some argue that high-status transgressors attract severe punishment when accused of ambiguous transgressions, others contend the opposite. In this paper, we attempt to reconcile this theoretical inconsistency. We propose that the capacity for social status to color third-party judgments of transgressions may depend on the status type of high-status actors. Drawing on the evolutionary theory of dominance and prestige as two alternate forms of status within social hierarchies, we suggest that actors associated with dominance-based status will be penalized more harshly than actors whose status is based on prestige. Across multiple studies employing archival field data, controlled lab experiments, and different instantiations of dominance, prestige, and misconduct, we consistently demonstrate that high-status dominant actors are punished more harshly than their prestigious counterparts. Further, we find that attributions of intentionality and lack of moral credentials explain the harsher punishments meted out to dominant (versus prestigious) high-status actors. In this way, we provide both a parsimonious reconciliation of the inconsistency in the extant literature and a theoretical explanation of how status type of high-status actors differentially impacts the judgment, decisions, and behaviors of third parties.Leadership InstituteLondon Business Schoo

Perilous and unaccountable: the positive relationship between dominance and moral hazard behaviors

Moral hazard involves a context where decision-makers engage in behaviors that prioritize self-interest while allowing the associated risk to be primarily borne by others. Such decision-making can lead to catastrophic consequences, as seen in the 2008 global financial crisis after hedge fund managers indiscriminately invested their clients’ money in subprime mortgages. This research examines which decision-makers are most likely to engage in moral hazard decision-making and the psychological mechanism driving this behavior. Drawing on the dual model of social influence, we posit that individuals associated with dominance, but not prestige, will engage in greater moral hazard behaviors. We further contend that these behaviors are driven by dominant decision-makers’ enhanced focus on end goals (outcomes) rather than the means (process) that they use to pursue such goals. We find support for our hypotheses across 13 studies (*NObservations* = 26,880; of which eight were pre-registered and six studies are reported in the Supplementary Information (SI)), using both correlational and experimental designs. Additionally, we vary the moral hazard context (e.g., a financial setting, a health and safety issue, etc.) and capture both behavioral intentions and actual behaviors, while also ruling out several alternative explanations. These findings demonstrate that dominant decision-makers engage in moral hazard behaviors because of their tendency to prioritize outcomes over processes