President Barack Obama’s iconic campaign poster summarized his platform in a single word: Change. He is likely to deliver on that promise, suggests a new psychology study. “Old leaders find it difficult to change because doing so implies that they were wrong in the past,” explains Dominic Abrams, a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent and the study’s lead author. “But when you have a new leader, you just have to say that the new leader is taking a new direction.”
Groups seldom like rebels in their ranks, the new study shows, and they like deviant leaders even less. But groups do grant new leaders special license to shake things up—at least at first. They are also willing to pay more money to new leaders who go against the group’s grain, the researchers find.
“People who are already members of a group are expected to conform to that group’s policies and norms,” says Abrams. “But new leaders have what we call an ‘innovation credit’ to make changes. That’s why businesses that are in trouble bring in a new chief executive. It’s very difficult for a board of directors to change strategy.”
To explore whether and when leaders can flout their organization’s status quo, the researchers asked undergraduates to read about fictitious group members who either agreed with or defied the group’s position on immigration policy. The students then rated how much they liked each group member. Across five experiments, the researchers manipulated whether the rated targets were current leaders, former leaders, future leaders, or mere members.
Obama is already bucking business as usual, notes David Brady, a professor of political science at Stanford University and deputy director of the Hoover Institution: “He is making a genuine attempt to be bipartisan. He kept Robert Gates [as secretary of defense], as well as nominated a Republican [Raymond LaHood] to be secretary of transportation.” Obama also invited conservative evangelical Christian pastor Rick Warren to offer the opening prayer at his inauguration. “Now that’s innovation,” adds Brady.
New leaders do not remain so forever. According to anecdotes, innovation credits last two to three months, says Abrams—hence the great store set by leaders’ first 100 days in office. But Brady thinks that the window for innovation opens wider. “Reagan didn’t get his most innovative policy [the Tax Reform Act of 1986] through until year six of his administration,” he says. British Prime Minister Tony Blair also had an agenda for change that “he was rather good at propelling forward for a long time,” says Abrams. “It wasn’t until the Iraq War [in the sixth year of his term] that things began to go pear-shaped for him.”
Dominic Abrams, Georgina Randsley de Moura, José M. Marques, and Paul Hutchison, “Innovation Credit: When Can Leaders Oppose Their Group’s Norms?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 2008.
Read more stories by Alana Conner.