Throughout the human civilization, people worked in teams and organizations. It is fascinating how people and organizations in power affected countries, and how they used power to create empires. The Business Insider is an Internet site that is not a reliable source for information, but it does have interesting articles that are thought provoking, and one article is “The 10 Greatest Empires In The History of The World” (Rogers & Johnson 2011). The ranking and reasons may not have solid proofs, but the empires listed are certainly well known: the British Empire, the Russian Empire, the Turkish Empire, the Qing Dynasty, to name a few. I can imagine in their days, leaders who were bullies, or jerks, using violence was very common. Today, in advanced countries, physically abusive bullies are not tolerated. But are business leaders today jerks? From my experience in the global business world, and according to Bob Sutton (2007) many business leaders are in fact jerks.
We hear and read plenty of things about the greatness as well as their negative traits of.famous leaders such as late Steve Jobs of Apple, Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, or Richard Branson of Virgin Group (Williams, 2012). I have never worked with them directly, so I can not say for certain how they are, but I have worked closely with managers of dozens of global companies over the past 25 years, and I can definitely say that some of them were bullies and narcissists. I am only glad that we live in today’s world, since at least, they will not be physically abusive. And if they are jerks, we have the option to leave the companies with leaders with traits like those described by Robert Sutton (2007), who are yell at individuals, talk behind individual’s back, or make an individual feel invisible by ignoring him.
Why do these jerks behave like that at workplace? One of the factors can be their need for power. According to McClelland’s need theory, people have the three needs in the workplace, Achievement (nACH), affiliation (nAff), and power (nPow) (Penn State University, 2014, McClelland & Burnham, 1976). When it comes to people who become leaders, often in the U.S., their need for power is most noticeable by people who work for them. There are two types of need for power, and one is personal power which is desire to control and influence other people (Penn State University, 2014). The other type of power is socialized power which is desire to gain power for the group (Penn State University, 2014). Effective leadership and positive relationship that promote long term success are associated with social power (Penn State University, 2014). From my limited experience, the ratio of leaders who wish for social power seem to be much higher than the leaders who wish for personal power. Perhaps this is what Sutton describes as effective jerk situation, where there is one jerk in an organization to remind people how not to behave. However, what I found is that when there are very few jerks around, the people within an organization do not know how to deal with them. Such is common case in Japan, and I feel that the damages a jerk can do to an organization is bigger there.
As I was listing the names of those leaders Forbes ranked in 2012 as some of greatest leaders, it struck me that these are the leaders who either started up companies to become global giants, or brought very small operations to mega global ones. So what did their companies have to do to become empires? They may not last like the great empires that last for hundreds of years, but how do they become sustainable? Sutton (2007) described his experience that company like Pixar which was started up by Steve Jobs, who was notorious for being a bully, that the company did not tolerate jerks. Sutton (2007) also gave an example of the owner of a major private company admitting he and his son were jerks, asking for help to change that. They seem to understand that in order for their company to stay in business for a long time, they need to have socialized power (Penn State University, 2014). How did British Empire, Spanish Empire, Russian Empire last so long? We can learn so much from history, especially from recent one such as British Empire where official literature is easily available. Who knows, we may uncover strikingly new things about power and leadership.
Resources
Penn State University (2014). Psychology 424: Applied Social Psychology Course. Chapter 6 : Intergroup Relations. Doi :https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/su14/psych424/001/content/11_lesson/01_page.html
Rogers, A. & Johnson, R (2011 November 9). . “The 10 Greatest Empires In The History of The World”. The Business Insider. Doi: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-10-greatest-empires-in-history-2011-9?op=1
Scheneider, Frank W., Gruman, Jamie A., Coutts, Larry M. (2012) Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems. Second Edition.
Sutton, R. (2007, May 30). Audio Podcast: The No Jerk Rule. Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture. Podcast retrieved from http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1715
Williams, D. (2012, July 24). “Top 10 List: The Greatest Living Business Leaders Today”. Forbes. Doi: http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkwilliams/2012/07/24/top-10-list-the-greatest-living-business-leaders-today/
Tags: bully, busines organization, jerk, leader, need for power
Hi sjt5096, thank you for your comment!
First of all, when I re-read my post, there were so many grammatical errors that I felt bad that you had to read in that form. I tried to correct the errors as much as possible.
I agree with you that leaders who have strong need for power tend to be jerks. I have seen some great leader jerks who care about his team and people in general too. They had strong need for power in order to be able to influence people who are in decision making positions. After seeing that some jerks are actually people who cared so much that they were not afraid to be seen as jerks to create positive results for all people, not just their family and friends, I stopped being judgmental about jerks.
This is a nice post which just going by the title, becomes quite enticing for the reader. I think you have a valid question in asking whether business leaders are today’s jerks. Of course this is not a question that I can answer with complete accuracy, but I cannot also accept as completely true. In fact you have given some very good about people’s needs in the workplace. Among these are the need for power and influence, the need for affiliation (and recognition) and the need for achievement. Given these factors, I can only say that business leaders being among those in the workplace, are not exempt from these needs. It is my opinion that only those with the need for power can fall into the category of being jerks. Business leaders who are seeking affiliation and recognition are in my view, unlikely to be jerks. We can however pay special attention to the fact that other things may come into play in allowing this behavior. McKay (2014) points out that culture is one of them and even though it develops over time, cultural change can be effective in changing behaviors.
Reference
McKay, R. B. (2014). Confronting workplace bullying: Agency and structure in the royal canadian mounted police. Administration & Society, 46(5), 548-572. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1534281606?accountid=13158