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Illegitimacy improves goal pursuit in powerless individuals

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Abstract

The effects of power legitimacy on self-regulation during goal pursuit were examined. Study 1 focused on goal-setting and goal-striving. Specifically, it examined how much time legitimate and illegitimate powerless individuals needed to set goals, and how many means they generated to pursue these goals. Study 2 examined persistence in the face of difficulties. Consistently across these studies illegitimacy improved self-regulation in powerless individuals. Illegitimate powerless individuals behaved similarly as control participants. They took less time to decide on a course of action, used more flexible means to strive for goals, and persisted longer in the face of difficulties, compared to their legitimate counterparts. The implications of these findings are discussed.

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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