(Illustration by Adam McCauley)
How does a manager’s leadership style affect how a team collaborates? Employees need to work closely together, for both productivity and morale, but they take cues from their bosses on how to behave. If a leader adopts a dictatorial way of interacting, workers might shift into feeling that they can succeed at work only if others fail.
This “zero-sum mindset” is the focus of a new paper by Hemant Kakkar, assistant professor of management and organizations at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, and Niro Sivanathan, associate professor of organizational behavior at London Business School. Using eight separate studies, the pair found that a dominant leader can induce staffers to be less supportive of colleagues, which in turn hampers teamwork.
“This research highlights the unintended consequences that dominant leaders have on their followers’ helping behavior by increasing their zero-sum mindset,” the researchers write.
The paper is rooted in social learning theory, which posits that employees look to their leaders to see, and imitate, how one is supposed to interact with others and rise in the group’s hierarchy. The authors distinguish two different managerial styles based on either prestige or dominance. Those with high levels of prestige share their knowledge, making others want to follow them, while dominant leaders compel their subordinates to do what they want using forceful tactics.
“Dominant leaders, who influence others by being assertive and competitive, shape their subordinates’ cognitive schema of success based on zero-sum thinking,” the researchers write. “Employees with a zero-sum mindset are more likely to believe that they can only make progress at the expense of others.”
Most of the experiments that made up the study involved a series of tests to see how people would behave while working for bosses reflecting the different leadership styles, and then to establish how they felt about helping others. In one experiment, for instance, the researchers tested subjects’ views on whether they would “take time to listen to coworkers’ problems and worries” or “help coworkers who are running behind in their work activities.”
The most interesting finding, according to Kakkar, was the idea that “just by the kind of leader you have, the leader is creating that effect on employee psychology.” If workers have a boss who “places their own interests first ahead of others,” they learn that is the way to rise in the company and start treating others that way.
While this paper focuses on management and psychology, the genesis of the research question comes from the political sphere. Kakkar, who is from India, took note of his country’s increasing polarization and Hindu versus Muslim sectarianism while writing his dissertation at London Business School. Similar instances of political and religious rifts have occurred recently in Sri Lanka, in the United Kingdom during Brexit, and in the United States during the Trump administration. Kakkar found it jarring that people who had previously coexisted peacefully would come to see their neighbor as their enemy.
“I was trying to make sense of why some of these things had come up, why people were thinking that their gain was based on someone else’s loss,” he recalls.
Kakkar also drew from his own experience as a software developer in India before graduate school: “I had worked for two years, so I had some idea of what it’s like to be under a boss who’s assertive and dominant.”
While the research literature has long established that employees watch their leaders for clues on how to act in the workplace, this paper advances the field by showing that dominant leaders produce zero-sum mindsets in their workers, says Subrahmaniam Tangirala, professor of management at the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business.
“We often wonder why workplaces become toxic and defined by hypercompetitiveness where employees do not help and support each other,” Tangirala says. “This article places the blame on leaders who feel that they need to act dominantly to be effective.”
How can organizations avoid the problems that stem from dominant leaders, since assertiveness will always be some bosses’ style of management? Some companies have scrapped appraising employees annually on a forced curve, with only a certain percentage allowed to receive a top rating. At some places, low-ranking employees were even culled. Getting rid of such draconian practices can lead to a more collaborative mindset, which helps the organization and its cohesion, Kakkar says.
Hemant Kakkar and Niro Sivanathan, “The Impact of Leader Dominance on Employees’ Zero-Sum Mindset and Helping Behavior,” Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming.
Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.