There is a potential paradox with being powerful: a powerful person is more likely to make a decision, but he or she is also more likely to be wrong!

It’s easy to see how, in evolutionary terms, power was helpful: small nomadic groups benefitted from sticking together and without a powerful leader, the group might easily fragment.  Even now, a company that can take action quickly can steal a march on its competitors.

Anyone who has ever served on a committee will appreciate, the larger the group of people who feel they have a role in determining the group’s direction, the more tedious and protracted the process of making a decision becomes.  Sometimes it’s a miracle that larger committees achieve anything at all.

So, having powerful people is vital for efficient progress but, as we all know, powerful people can become blinkered and make decisions that are questionable.  The problem is that, because of their power, they are less open to being challenged.

Recent research suggests that there may be a link between being powerful and making poor decisions.  Rather than there being a flaw in the people who have a strong drive for power, the situation makes it more likely that they will feel more confident about their decision-making than they should.

Researchers devised a number of experiments in which some of the participants were primed to feel powerful or lacking in power.  This was done either by asking them to write about a situation where they had experienced such feelings, or by putting them in a scenario where they were either a Supervisor or Production Worker, with the former deciding whether a bonus should be paid.

People were then asked to answer trivia questions, and to bet money on their confidence in their answer (they could choose to bet nothing).

Contrasting the powerfully primed people with the others produced a fascinating result.  When people felt powerful they over-estimated the accuracy of their personal knowledge.  They lost money betting on their knowledge, whilst those who did not feel powerful made less risky bets and didn’t lose money!

Power is contextual: at any moment any of us might find ourselves in a situation where we realise we have it.  At such times our brains appear to delude themselves about how good our thinking is.

As I mentioned, there is a paradox with power: we need powerful people to take action and galvanise teams, but there needs to be some mechanism to ensure that they are confidently driving forward with the right agenda.

The solution to this paradox is for powerful people to find trusted advisers whose opinions they respect sufficiently and to create a relationship with those advisers that means those people won’t be unduly intimidated by the leader’s power.

In psychological terms the challenge is significant: at a time when he or she is feeling certain, a leader needs to have trained themselves with the heuristic that automatically asks, “Am I just feeling certain because I have the power to do what I’m considering?”

Source: Fast, N. J., et al. Power and overconfident decision-making. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (2011), doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2011.11.009

Image courtesy: Cornelia Kopp