“Karl Marx really nailed it,” says Deborah H. Gruenfeld, a professor of leadership and organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The father of communism described how employers in capitalistic societies value workers solely on the basis of their ability to create wealth, and not on the basis of their kindness, morality, and other human qualities.
Adding grist to Marx’s mill, Gruenfeld and her colleagues recently published research showing that power often makes people objectify others— that is, treat others as means to ends, rather than as ends unto themselves. Powerful people also “scan the landscape looking for people who can be helpful or useful for their own goals,” she says. “They are less prone to value a relationship for the sake of the relationship.”
The authors of the study first compared executives to MBA students and discovered that the executives had a stronger tendency to view their relationships as instruments for their personal success. The researchers then manipulated participants’ feelings of having more or less power, as well as their work, sexual, and social goals. Across five experiments, they found that when participants felt powerful, they preferred to be with people who could advance their goals—even if these people weren’t very nice.
“There is a knee-jerk reaction that objectification is bad,” says Gruenfeld. “But in fact, it’s what makes organizations work. The ability to engage other people in accomplishing your objectives is what you have to do if you are going to have an impact,” whether that impact is “building your own empire or trying to save the world,” she says. “It’s a very American thing to want to make power differences go away. I don’t think it’s doable, and I don’t think it would be as good as we fantasize it would be.”
At the same time, objectification does do damage. “Subordinates sometimes end up having to play along with the high-power person’s goals and intentions, even when they are not in [the subordinate’s] best interest,” Gruenfeld notes. And as Marx observed some 150 years ago, “objectification by people in power leads low-power people to be alienated from themselves,” she says. “They start thinking of themselves in terms of what they can do for other people,” rather than in terms of what they want for themselves.
Underlings do have recourse, however. “You can have straightforward, explicit conversations about your own goals in the relationship [with the person in power],” says Gruenfeld. She acknowledges, however, that initiating these conversations “is all the more difficult for low-power people.” For their part, organizations should try to curb their leaders’ less egalitarian tendencies by reminding them of their responsibilities to their subordinates, the authors write.
Read more stories by Alana Conner.