https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_group_dynamics_that_give_power_to_bad_bosses?utm_source=pocket_collection_story
Have you ever had a really bad boss? Think Alec Baldwin as Blake in Glengarry Glen Ross, who announces that “coffee’s for closers only” and then threatens the salesmen he supervises with a number of choice terms not suitable to repeat here. Few leaders use quite so much verbal abuse, profanity, and fear to motivate employees. But plenty of leaders use similar, if less extreme, tactics. Deborah Gruenfeld would like to know why so many people put up with them.
Gruenfeld, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business and an expert on the psychology of power, is interested in “dominant actors” like Blake: leaders who assert power by being the most competitive, most aggressive, and most controlling person in the room. “There is this tendency for people to allow others to assert dominance without resisting,” she says. “People who behave this way tend to be very successful even though people really don’t like or respect them very much.”
This is a puzzling phenomenon: Why follow someone who isn’t doing a good job or making good decisions? That kind of deference is illogical, but it’s pervasive. Previous research has suggested that our tendency to bow to the whims of dominant actors results from our fear of them, and what they might do if we refuse to follow them. Other studies have shown that people often defer to dominance because they misinterpret confidence for competence.
In a recent paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Gruenfeld demonstrates that group dynamics are also an important factor in our willingness to accept and obey aggressive bosses. “We live in a world where there’s an expectation that dominance should be deferred to,” she says. “You’re often in a situation where you can’t understand why everyone else is acting as though they respect the person.” But that powerful group dynamic plays an important role in allowing bad bosses to maintain control even when the rest of their organization disapproves of their tactics.
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