Bosses habitually overestimate their ability to win respect and support from their underlings
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The results, published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, will come as a shock to business big cheeses, but to no one else. In one experiment, he randomly assigned people in work groups with positions of high or low power, or to a control group. Questioned afterwards, those primed with high power were convinced the others were on their side; a view not shared by those being bossed. In another he found that lowly participants would form alliances against the powerful, even when it was not in their financial interest to do so. The mighty were blissfully unaware of the forces working against them.
So not only do bosses set too much store by their strengths, as our Schumpeter column notes, they also habitually overestimate their ability to win respect and support from their underlings. Somehow, on reaching the corner office, they lose the knack of reading subtle cues in others behaviour: in a further experiment Mr Brion found that when a boss tells a joke to a subordinate, he loses his innate ability to distinguish between a real and fake smile.
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http://www.economist.com/news/business/21579031-powerful-overestimate-support-underlings-whos-behind-me?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/whosbehindme
Arctic Dave
(13,812 posts)An organization is like a tree full of monkeys, all on different limbs at different levels.
Some monkeys are climbing up, some down.
The monkeys on top look down and see a tree full of smiling faces.
The monkeys on the bottom look up and see nothing but assholes.
Sherman A1
(38,958 posts)But, that's just my opinion.