Summaries: the best scientific articles for leadership and power summarized

Introduction

Leadership research has focused on effective leadership, assuming that the absence of success factors in leaders leads to ineffective leadership. This might not be the case: employees report bullying, theft, sabotage and corruption among their leaders. Understanding and preventing destructive leadership is therefore very important.

A definition of destructive leadership

The definition of destructive leadership that is described in this article is as follows: “The systematic and repeated behaviour by a leader that violates the legitimate interest of the organization by undermining or sabotaging its goals and the motivation, well-being and/or satisfaction of subordinates”. Note:

The main question of this article is: why do the powerful derogate subordinates? Specifically, the role of positional insecurity and negative expectancies about the subordinate are investigated.

Effects of power on social perception

Power is defined as the amount of unshared control possessed by one person over another person (e.g. rewards and punishments). Legitimate power is power in a relationship that is structured such that one member of the relationship has the right to control the behaviours of a subordinate other (definition by French &

Introduction

The main proposition that is advocated in this article is that power leads directly to action. Power is not only an aspect of the social structure; it is also a cognitive structure that can be activated by an environmental stimulus.

Power is defined as the ability to control resources, own and others’, without social interference. This is also called social power because one can influence others’ behaviour by assigning resources or evaluating them.

The main question that the authors are trying to answer here is: Does the possession and experience of power lead individuals toward action?

The reasons why they think it would are as follows:

• Because the powerful experience less

Introduction

Power dispersion is the difference among group members’ power (in Dutch it is: de verspreiding van macht). The main question that the authors are trying to answer is: when does power dispersion facilitate group interactions? And when does it harm group interactions? Power is again defined as the capacity to modify others’ states.

There is conflicting literature on the topic of power dispersion: on the one hand, high power dispersion (when one member of the group has a lot more power than others in the group) can be beneficial to conflict solution, it can serve as a heuristic for the distribution of resources and it facilitates coordination. On the other

Introduction

Epistemic motivation is the desire to develop a thorough understanding of the situation. The main question that the authors of this article are trying to answer is: when do positive versus negative leader emotional displays lead teams to perform better? The answer to this question is based on the emotions as social information model (EASI) that suggests that there are two distinct pathways, namely affective reactions and quality of leader’s performance.

Theoretical development and hypotheses

The social-functional approach states that emotions do not only influence the behaviour of those experiencing the emotion, but also the behaviours of others.