Powerful people tend to punish their subordinates harshly

Powerful people tend to punish their subordinates harshly

    Providing a sense of power to someone instills a black-andwhite sense of right and wrong (especially wrong), a new study suggests.
    Once armed with this moral clarity, powerful people then perceive wrongdoing with much less ambiguity than people lacking this power, and punish apparent wrong-doers with more severity than people without power would.
THE FINDINGS The researchers, based in the US, alerts managers to some unforeseen challenges they will face as they come to hold more and more power. “We noticed in our MBA classes that the students who seemed to feel most powerful had these absolute answers about what’s right and what’s wrong,” one of the researchers said.
    “We found the same phenomenon when we made other people feel powerful, and we also found that the resulting clarity led people to punish questionable behaviour more severely,” he added.
    “That link between power and more severe punishment could cause a huge problem for managers. What a manager sees as appropriate punishment could be seen as absolutely draconian by other people,” he went on to say.
THE EXPERIMENT The researchers set up four experiments in which they made some individuals feel powerful — by giving them the ability to control resources and administer rewards or punishments. When presented with cases of transgressions, the powerful participants were more likely to say, “Yes, the behaviour is immoral,” and “No, it is not immoral”.
    Very few powerful people answered with “it depends,” which was a much more popular answer among the less powerful.
    Owing to this certainty, the participants made to feel powerful felt that the transgressions deserved harsher punishments. The researchers found that moral clarity was more clearly connected to delivering punishments than administering bonuses for good behaviour.
WHAT IT MEANS “Our findings do not imply that having this moral clarity leads people to obtain power. Rather, the findings imply that once you obtain power you become more likely to see things in black-and-white,” the researchers said.
    ANI

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