Power plays take both parties on an awful trip, study finds

Participants did exercises to make them feel powerful, then recorded the effects

When we talk about someone being on a “power trip,” the idea behind it is that the abuse they’re throwing around somehow makes them feel good. The boss who hands out extra work just before the weekend feels some kind of superiority. The manager who yells at their employees gets some kind of rush from the show of dominance.

But a new study published by the Academy of Management Journal finds that in reality, a boss’ explosive behaviour or habit of ridiculing subordinates in front of others actually makes them feel pretty awful, too.

Trevor Foulk, an assistant professor at the University of Florida who is soon joining the business faculty at the University of Maryland, says that most studies on “psychological power” — which measures how powerful we feel — only look at how it affects the victim.

“The story typically ends there,” he said in an interview. “Here we’re flipping the script. When people feel powerful and act on it, it doesn’t feel good for them either.” Foulk studied executive MBA (Master of Business Administration) class members — rather than doing lab-based experiments on undergraduate students — who held real manager positions such as executive vice-president or director of operations in their day jobs. Each day for two weeks, the 108 participants were sent three surveys a day. The first one, in the morning, often included what Foulk calls a power manipulation — an exercise intended to prime the executives to feel more powerful, such as writing about a time they felt that way or completing exercises using powerful words. A control group didn’t receive the power nudge in their morning survey.

Then, in the afternoon, they com- pleted another survey about what kind of behaviour they engaged in — did they yell at a co-worker, make fun of an employee, perceive others as acting uncivil to them — during the day.

Finally, an evening survey asked them whether they felt competent, respected, in control of themselves, relaxed at home and the like.

They found that those who were primed to feel more powerful in the morning engaged in more abusive behaviour during the day and perceived employees as being more uncivil toward them.

The study found their subjects were more likely to feel worse about themselves and less relaxed at the end of the day

They also found those subjects were more likely to feel worse about themselves and less relaxed at the end of the day.

“It made them feel less fulfilled,” Foulk said, adding that they did poorer on important indicators for “need fulfilment” — competence, autonomy and relatedness. “We typically think about victims. But actually, everybody involved suffers.”

One exception to the rule, Foulk said, were bosses who scored high on one of the “big five” psychological traits — agreeableness. They tended to be less affected by the survey manipulations.

“Even when they feel powerful, they’re less likely to abuse and perceive incivility of others,” Foulk said. “It highlights the importance of agreeable leaders. It’s not only for others, internally, to be better off. The leader himself will be, too. They stop the process,” preventing the cycle of negative feelings that results from abusive behaviour on both the victim — and the boss.

In other words, “everybody would benefit,” Foulk said, if companies just hired people who were more empathetic, co-operative, kind and like helping others. Imagine that.