Too Many Leaders Spoil the Group

Source: University of Texas

One of the many hats I wear is that I direct the Human Dimensions of Organizations program at the University of Texas. We teach people in business and nonprofits about people. One of the classes that is part of our program focuses on leadership. It is taught by the great classics scholar Paul Woodruff who brings both a perspective thinking about the ancient world as well as his own military experience to bear on thinking about leadership.

There is a big trend in education to create leadership programs, because of the assumption that society needs more leaders. Many of these programs focus on trying to create people who can effectively lead others and to take on the reins of power. When we teach leadership in our program, though, Professor Woodruff focuses on the importance of learning to be both a leader and a follower.

Most people who want to be in positions of leadership would not want to be followers. That is why they pursue leadership roles. So, why would you want to teach leaders to be good followers as well.

One reason is explored in a paper by John Angus Hildreth and Cameron Anderson in the February, 2016 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

These researchers examined what happens when groups of leaders get together to collaborate. The results are not pretty.

In one study, leadership was manipulated. Six participants came to the lab at a time. First, the participants were arbitrarily put together in pairs, and one was assigned to be the leader. Each pair then completed a task in which they were given toothpicks and candies and were asked to build the highest tower they could. The high power individual was told to make all of the group’s decisions. The high power individual was also given the chance to determine how much money would be allocated to each of them if their design was the tallest.

After this power manipulation, the six participants in the session were divided into two groups. One group had all of the high power people in it. The other had all of the lower power people. Each group had to complete a creativity task in which they designed a business. Afterward, independent judges rated the creativity of the final product of each group as well as the quality of the group interactions. A control group of participants performed the tower building task, but there was no power manipulation.

The control groups and low power groups generated more creative ideas than the groups made up of high-power individuals. The groups of high-power individuals had more conflict and were less likely to work together and to share information than the groups of low-power (and control) individuals.

It was not that high power made people less creative, though. In a second study, the same power manipulation was used, but then people worked alone to generate a creative idea for a business. In this individual task, the high-power individuals were actually more creative than the low-power individuals.

Other studies in this paper used a difficult negotiation task. One study used executives from a health-care company. Groups made up only of high-power executives had a harder time reaching an agreement in the difficult task than groups made up of lower-power executives. Once again, the high-power groups did not work well together. They had more conflict and were less likely to share information than low-power groups. The researchers repeated this study using the power manipulation from the first study I described and obtained a similar result.

This research suggests that many leaders learn how to influence others, but they do not learn how to follow as well. As a result, when groups of people in leadership roles get together, they may have difficulty coordinating their activity.

That is why our program thinks it is so important to teach leadership by focusing both on leading and following. Most organizations need to be fluid in the way they organize tasks. On many days, an executive may be focused on leading a work group. But, at other times, groups of executives will need to collaborate to solve a difficult problem. That means that leaders need to be able to shift flexibly between leading groups and becoming part of collaborations. If everybody tries to lead, then groups fail.

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