Does authority turn good people into bad leaders?

August 18, 2010

Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd was known as an unusually effective and straight-laced executive, so when he resigned last week in an ethics scandal, many people expressed surprise. But the public shouldn’t have been shocked, Jonah Lehrer writes for The Wall Street Journal. Surveys of organizations have shown that the vast majority of rude and inappropriate workplace behaviors, such as the shouting of profanities, come from those with the most authority.

Psychologists call it “the paradox of power.” Contrary to the Machiavellian cliché that self-serving and morally dubious behavior leads to power, studies have found that people give authority to those they genuinely like. But the traits that help leaders accumulate control in the first place often disappear once they rise to power. Instead of being polite, honest and empathetic, they become impulsive, reckless and rude.

“When you give people power, they basically start acting like fools,” Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, is quoted as saying. “They flirt inappropriately, tease in a hostile fashion, and become totally impulsive.” Keltner notes that people with authority tend to behave like neurological patients with a damaged orbito-frontal lobe, a brain area crucial for empathy and decision-making.

Studies have found that people in positions of authority are more likely to rely on stereotypes and generalizations when judging other people, Lehrer writes. Their sense of power makes it easier for them to rationalize ethical lapses, and instead of analyzing the strength of an argument, they focus on whether it confirms what they already believe. If not, the facts are ignored. — Greg Beaubien

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