Power, competitiveness, and advice taking: Why the powerful don’t listen

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Abstract

Four experiments test the prediction that feelings of power lead individuals to discount advice received from both experts and novices. Experiment 1 documents a negative relationship between subjective feelings of power and use of advice. Experiments 2 and 3 further show that individuals experiencing neutral and low levels of power weigh advice from experts and experienced advisors more heavily than advice from novices, but individuals experiencing high levels of power discount both novice and expert advice. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrate that this tendency of individuals experiencing high levels of power to discount advice from experts and novices equally is mediated by feelings of competitiveness (Experiment 3) and confidence (Experiments 3 and 4). Finally, Experiment 4 shows that inducing high power individuals to feel cooperative with their advisors can mitigate this tendency, leading them to weigh expert advice more heavily than advice from novices. Theoretical and practical contributions are discussed.

Highlights

► Power leads to the discounting of both expert and novice advice. ► This effect is mediated by feelings of competitiveness and confidence. ► Feelings of cooperation mitigate this tendency.

Introduction

Organizational leaders rarely make critical decisions in isolation. Instead, decision makers more often receive input from advisors from both within and outside their organizations. For example, in the process of making a critical strategic decision, a CEO might receive advice from various members of her board, her top management team, or from a team of consultants. This advice can have varying levels of impact on her ultimate decision. In some circumstances, she may ignore the advice completely; at other times, the advice she receives may influence her decision dramatically. Does the CEO’s relative power change her psychological openness to advice? Does the CEO’s relative power influence her sensitivity to more or less expert advice?

Research has identified three types of factors that influence individuals’ use of advice. First, characteristics of the judgment task affect the extent to which advice influences decisions. Specifically, research has indicated that decision makers weigh advice more heavily when the advice is costly to obtain (Gino, 2008, Patt et al., 2006) and when the task is difficult (Gino and Moore, 2007, Gino et al., 2009). Second, characteristics of the advisor can have an important influence on the extent of advice use. For example, research indicates that advice is weighted more heavily when advisors are relatively more experienced or knowledgeable than the decision makers (Feng and MacGeorge, 2006, Goldsmith and Fitch, 1997, Harvey and Fischer, 1997, Sniezek et al., 2004, Soll and Larrick, 2009, Yaniv, 2004, Yaniv and Kleinberger, 2000, Yaniv and Milyavsky, 2007) and when the advisors express greater confidence in the quality of their advice (Lawrence and Warren, 2003, Phillips, 1999, Sniezek and Buckley, 1995, Sniezek and Van Swol, 2001, Soll and Larrick, 2009, Van Swol and Sniezek, 2005, Yaniv and Foster, 1997). Finally, aspects of the decision maker’s internal states can impact the extent of advice-taking. For example, decision makers weigh others’ opinions less heavily when they are feeling confident (see Bonaccio and Dalal (2006) for a review) or when experiencing incidental emotions that increase feelings of certainty, such as anger (Gino & Schweitzer, 2008).

In this article, we focus on a type of internal state that is of critical importance in decision making contexts: the decision maker’s subjective sense of power. A subjective sense of power refers to the extent to which individuals feel that they can exert influence over the outcomes and experiences of others (Anderson and Berdahl, 2002, Van Kleef et al., 2008). Prior research on power has proposed that the sense of power has wide-ranging psychological consequences (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003). For example, recent work has found that the experience of power leads people to act more independently of others (Galinsky, Magee, Gruenfeld, Whitson, & Liljenquist, 2008) and to resist being influenced by the opinions and perspectives of others (Brinol, Petty, Valle, Rucker, & Becerra, 2007), thereby reducing the accuracy of their judgments (See, Morrison, Rothman, & Soll, 2011). We suggest that not only does the experience of power lead individuals to be less open to using advice from others, but that power can lead individuals to discount advice even from individuals who have high levels of expertise.

Section snippets

Power and advice taking

One of the most robust findings in the advice taking literature is that people exhibit egocentric advice discounting (Yaniv, 2004, Yaniv and Kleinberger, 2000) in that they underweight advice from others and over-weight their own opinions (see Bonaccio and Dalal (2006) for a review). Scholars have argued that this discounting of advice is particularly likely to occur when decision makers perceive their own opinions to be superior to the opinions and perspectives of others (Krueger, 2003) and

The role of advisor experience and expertise

Individuals commonly weigh advice received from experienced and knowledgeable advisors more heavily than advice received from advisors with less experience or expertise (Feng and MacGeorge, 2006, Goldsmith and Fitch, 1997, Harvey and Fischer, 1997, Sniezek et al., 2004, Yaniv, 2004, Yaniv and Kleinberger, 2000, Yaniv and Milyavsky, 2007). Although this research has focused on advice taking in dyadic interactions, related studies have examined the influence of knowledgeable and expert team

Overview of present research

We tested our hypotheses in four experimental studies. Following the approach of other scholars in the advice taking literature (e.g., Gino and Moore, 2007, Yaniv, 2004), the studies employed different estimation tasks over multiple rounds. In the first study, we examined the negative effect of power on the degree of advice weighting (Hypothesis 1). The remaining three studies then manipulated the expertise of the advisor by varying the advisor’s prior domain experience (Experiment 2) or level

Experiment 1: Power and advice taking

In Experiment 1, we first asked people to engage in an estimation task over multiple rounds. We then manipulated whether participants experienced a high vs. low sense of power. We also included a control condition. After the power manipulation, participants engaged in the repeated estimation task once again but this second time they also received advice from others. We expected to find a negative relationship between power and advice weighting (Hypothesis 1), such that people experiencing a

Experiment 2: Power, advisor experience, and advice taking

Experiment 1 demonstrated that individuals primed with high feelings of power were less open to others’ advice compared to individuals with low feelings of power or individuals in a control condition. In Experiment 1, participants received advice attributed to a randomly chosen participant from a previous study. This description provided no direct information about the relative ability of the advisor. Experiment 2 tested whether the same results would hold when advice is received from an

Experiment 3: Power, advisor expertise, and advice use

Our first two studies demonstrated that individuals primed with high power were less open to others’ advice compared to individuals with low power, even when advice is received from an experienced rather than inexperienced advisor. The goal of Experiment 3 was twofold. First, we wanted to test whether an advisor’s expertise would produce the same results as an advisor’s level of experience (providing a second test of Hypothesis 2). Second, we wanted to examine the roles of competitiveness and

Experiment 4: Power, competitiveness, and advice use

The results of Experiment 3 indicated that high power people feel competitive when exposed to advice from experts and that these feelings of competition lead them to inflate their confidence and underweight experts’ advice. Thus, one important implication of Study 3 is that when powerful people feel cooperative with their advisors, rather than competitive, they are likely to behave similarly to their lower power counterparts and weigh the advice of experts more heavily than advice from novices.

General discussion

The four experiments presented here demonstrate that feelings of power lead individuals to decrease their use of advice from others and to discount advice from experts and novices equivalently. In Experiment 1, the findings confirmed that there is a negative relationship between subjective feelings of power and use of advice from others. In addition, Experiments 2–4 demonstrated that individuals experiencing high levels of power not only discounted advice from novice advisors, but also

Conclusions

Other people are a source of broader perspectives and differing opinions. Acquiring this information is arguably the easiest way to improve one’s decisions (Larrick, 2009). But do people listen to others? Individuals with formal positions of authority are generally granted broad decision-making authority and would benefit from listening to others; however, formal authority itself can create feelings of power, competitiveness, and confidence that inhibit advice taking. The studies presented here

Acknowledgments

The authors greatly appreciate the support and facilities of the Center for Behavioral Decision Research at Carnegie Mellon University, the Center for Decision Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Center for Leadership and Strategic Thinking at the University of Washington.

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