FlashReportIllegitimacy improves goal pursuit in powerless individuals
Section snippets
1. Introduction
Power – the ability to influence others (Vescio, Gervais, Snyder, & Hoover, 2005), and to control others’ outcomes (Fiske, 1993) – is a pervasive feature of social structures. In today’s society power emerges to facilitate problem solving and group decision making (van Vugt, 2006). Power hierarchies are necessary and consented by society at large because they serve collective goals. Consequently, power positions tend to be occupied by merit, competence or social agreement (Boehm and Flack, in
2. Study 1
Efficient goal pursuit requires the ability to distinguish between important and unimportant desires, which initiates faster decisions and goal-setting (Gollwitzer, Heckhausen, & Ratajczak, 1990; see also Förster et al., 2005, Shah et al., 2002). It also requires flexibility in the means used to pursue goals (Deci and Ryan, 1985, Locke and Latham, 1990). These aspects of goal pursuit were examined in Study 1.
We measured the time participants needed to set a goal, and the number of means they
3. Study 2
Study 2 examined an additional aspect of self-regulation necessary for successful goal pursuit: persistence in the face of difficulties (Goschke and Kuhl, 1993, Gollwitzer, 1996). Moreover, a control condition was included to verify whether powerlessness affects goal pursuit when power is illegitimate.
Participants were asked to search for 12 words embedded in a matrix of letters. In reality, the matrix only contained 8 words, which rendered the task difficult. The total time participants took
4. General discussion
Past research has shown that being in a powerless position has detrimental effects for goal pursuit (Guinote, 2007c). However, this research focused only on legitimate power relations. The present article expands this work by examining the effects of power legitimacy on the performance of powerless individuals. Consistent with previous findings, powerlessness had a negative impact on goal pursuit, but only when participants were primed with legitimate powerlessness. In contrast, when
Acknowledgement
This research was supported by the Grant SEJ-2007-34362/PSIC from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia), and by the Grant SGS/35183 from the Nuffield Foundation.
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2014, Journal of Experimental Social PsychologyCitation Excerpt :As the results so far do not allow for conclusions on whether this effect is driven by high power, low power, or both, Study 4 sought to resolve this issue. Overall, research on social power indicates that, in comparison to equal power control groups, powerlessness can decrease (e.g., Smith & Trope, 2006; Willis, Guinote, & Rodríguez-Bailón, 2010) and elevated power can increase goal-directed behavior (e.g., DeWall, Baumeister, Mead, & Vohs, 2010; Fast et al., 2009; Schmid Mast et al., 2009; Smith & Trope, 2006). Though these effects are rarely found within the same study, this previous research suggests that we should find either an impact of high or an impact of low power (compared to the equal power condition, respectively) on self-focused counterfactual thoughts.
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2012, Journal of Experimental Social PsychologyCitation Excerpt :In particular, power holders appear to denigrate subordinates primarily when they feel insecure about their capacity to demonstrate competence, similar to research on more direct forms of aggression (Fast & Chen, 2009). Additionally, perceived incompetence may foster feelings of illegitimacy and instability (Lammers, Galinsky, Gordijn, & Otten, 2008; Rodriguez-Balion, Moya, & Yzerbyt, 2000; Willis, Guinote, & Rodriguez-Bailon, 2010). Importantly, the present findings move beyond existing work to demonstrate what subordinates may do to overcome this problem—namely, offer gratitude for help received.
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