How authoritarian do you have to be to be a leader?
Hello!
Does everyone have a leadership spirit? Or is it a characteristic feature? Or do we develop ourselves in this direction because we want to be leaders?
Does a person's personality change when he has authority? Would your behavior change if they gave you an important authority? For example, if you were an official who decides who will do what work, would your behavior change? Immediately “Power does not corrupt me!” don't say. The situation is not as simple as you think. Hundreds of experiments on this subject prove that most people change when they gain authority and authority.
In 2003, an experiment was conducted on three university students. The researcher randomly selected two of the three students and asked them to write a short report on a topic. He also asked the third student that he randomly selected to read the reports and measure the success of the other two. The experiment lasted for half an hour, and at the end, the experimenter offered coffee and cookies to everyone. There were five cookies in a plate on the table. There were four people at the table, including the experimenter. Everyone ate a cookie and drank a coffee. Well, who do you think ate the fifth cookie? Yes, you know: A student who was randomly selected to the “controlling” position a while ago ate.
Before the experiment, all three students were equal, they did not differ from each other. They were all students of the same class, of the same age, from the same social background, but one of them had accidentally been empowered and was entitled to eat more cookies than anyone else. In this experiment repeated over and over, the students with authority all showed the same behavior. They ate the last cookie happily, smacking their mouths. (Robert I. Sutton, How to be a good boss in a bad economy, HBR, June 2009)
That's what it's like to have power. Those in power focus on their own wants and needs. They become insensitive to the feelings of others and their needs. If you work in a workplace, this situation is very familiar to you. There are very few people who have authority but do not change their behavior.
There is also the other side of the coin: The personalities of those who have authority change, but how much do people submit to authority and authority? Does a person's personality change when he interacts with people in authority? Unfortunately, people change their personalities under the command of authority, just as their behavior (personality) changes when they give authority.
One of the most striking experiments, proving how weak people are in the face of authority and how far they go in obeying authority, was conducted by the famous social psychologist Stanley Milgram from Yale University. When this experiment was first performed, it caused great confusion and controversy. The experiment took place in 1961, three months after Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann began his trial in Jerusalem. “Were Eichmann and the hundreds of thousands of people involved in the Holocaust simply doing their part, or were they simply war criminals?” was looking for an answer.
The experiment was carried out on people of different ages and occupations. The subjects were divided into two groups as teacher and student. Subjects were told that the experiment was intended to measure "the effect of punishment on learning." The subject teacher will ask questions to the subject student; If he got a wrong answer, he would electrocute the subject student at a strength ranging from fifteen volts to four hundred and fifty volts. The expert (authority) next to the teacher would influence the teacher to continuously increase the voltage.
In fact, what was tested here was not the relationship between punishment and learning, but how much the subject teacher would raise the voltage in line with the orders of an authority (expert). Milgram thus aimed to learn how ordinary people can torment other people when they come under the control of an authority. Milgram wanted to test whether people, when obeying an authority, would act under authority that they refuse to do in their daily lives.
Under these circumstances, do you think, what percent of the participants agreed to supply four hundred and fifty volts of electricity? Before explaining the results of the experiment, Milgram asked psychologists, psychiatrists, and his own students to predict the outcome. None of them had predicted that the experimenters could go up to four hundred and fifty volts, but the result was sixty-five percent. Yes, sixty-five out of a hundred had increased the electrical intensity up to four hundred and fifty volts.
Moreover, this experiment was repeated many times, but the result did not change. On average, sixty-five percent of the participants were able to give four hundred and fifty volts of electricity to people they did not know and who had never harmed them.
With these experiments, Milgram proved that people are inclined to obey authority, even though it contradicts their own conscience. He showed how seemingly innocent and in fact very valuable traits such as obedience to order, loyalty to authority, discipline can be devastating when misdirected.
This research made a lot of noise and found wide coverage in the newspapers. The experiment was then repeated at various places and at different times. It was done with groups of up to a thousand people, with men and women. The results could be slightly above or below the first experiment, but not very different.
Moreover, the research was not conducted only in the USA. When the experiment was repeated in different cultures, such as England and Australia, the obedience rate was lower than in the original research, but the majority still obeyed authority. Higher rates were emerging in Spain, Austria and Germany. (For example, in Germany, the rate of obedience to authority was eighty-five percent.) Outside of Western countries, for example, in Jordan, the results were even higher. (The Milgram test was last repeated last year, the results were still the same.) People who would never resort to violence on their own could be part of terrible torture under an authority. They were submissive to authority, even though they clearly saw the devastating consequences of their work.
However, authority is a basic need for all of us. Where there is no authority, there is chaos. Every group, every organization needs authority. Order and control are indispensable elements in even the simplest organizations. What needs to be emphasized is that on the one hand, authority is a sine qua non need, and on the other hand, the possibility that both the authority itself and those who obey itunconditionally can do irrational things.
The companies we live in today have similar weaknesses. When the company manager takes over the authority, he starts to feel as if he naturally has many features that he does not actually have. He thinks he knows everything about the company. He starts to think as if he has enough knowledge about everything. He focuses more on his own needs and priorities than the needs and expectations of the people he manages, and falls into the misconception that the world revolves around him. When he listens to a subject, he immediately thinks that he has grasped all the dimensions of that subject and has the knowledge to make a decision. Many managers have the misconception that the leader's seat raises their intelligence quotient. He finds the strength to make decisions with little knowledge about people.
Of course, human weaknesses are not incomprehensible; but the essence of leadership is not that a person has privileges such as a position or title, but what benefit he produces for whom with the opportunities and powers he has. Every person who wants to be a leader asks himself, “What privileges will I access?” Instead of asking the question, “Can I really be useful to people?” should ask the question. The more positive results a person who runs a company or a country achieves, the more effective a leader he is.
A leader's authority derives not from his position or title, but from people's respect for his knowledge, experience, and competence, and their willingness to accept his rule.
