"Over 60 years of research on participative leadership has documented the many benefits of power-sharing," according to researcher Peter Coleman at Columbia University: "These include an increase in decision acceptance, commitment and quality, as well as enhanced employee development, satisfaction, and commitment" and greater managerial and organizational success. Despite this, many managers resist sharing leadership, and not all the reasons are known.
Coleman recruited 98 graduate students in MBA or organizational psychology programs. Each participant performed a bogus computer task that actually "primed" them by repeatedly flashing either words denoting competition ("winner," "opponent," etc.), cooperation ("mutual," "coworker") or neither (a string of asterisks). Finally, he asked their general feelings about sharing power and asked for responses to a managerial case study.
Some respondents believed that power—"the ability to bring about desired outcomes"—rested at the top of organizations and was something you had to compete for against colleagues. Others believed (more accurately, according to some studies) that real power is distributed unevenly throughout the middle layers of organizations, and can be developed in cooperation with colleagues. These groups gave this study a fascinating split decision: The "competitors" were less likely to involve employees in specific decisions than cooperators, as you might expect, but they were also more likely to delegate authority in general. People primed to be competitive were less likely to involve employees and to share resources in the case study responses, but priming had no effect on their general attitudes toward authority. In other words, a single shot of priming affected short-term judgment but not long-term attitudes.
Source: Coleman, P. (04), "Implicit Theories of Organizational Power and Priming Effects on Managerial Power-Sharing Decisions: An Experimental Study," Journal of Applied Social Psychology 34(2): 297.
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© 2009 by Jim Morgan. All rights reserved.