TIME Magazine Article Profiles Study of Leadership Competency

[nonesuche]

I will hope all will scroll to the last paragraph, if you do, then you will understand why I have posted this in the political thread.

I found this study downright fascinating, just further proof of what boggles my mind at work so often of late.

Competence: Is Your Boss Faking It?
By Jeffrey Kluger
Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2009

Bosses may be an overbearing breed, but more often than not, you've got to admire their business chops. Wouldn't you love to have that same sense of competence and confidence, that ability to assess tough problems and reach smart solutions on the fly? Guess what? So would they. If you have ever suspected that your boss isn't actually good enough at what he or she does to deserve the job in the first place, a new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that you might be right.

Social psychologists know that one way to be viewed as a leader in any group is simply to act like one. Speak up, speak well and offer lots of ideas, and before long, people will begin doing what you say. This works well when leaders know what they're talking about, but what if they don't? If someone acts like a boss but thinks like a boob, is that still enough to stay on top?

To determine just how easily an all-hat-no-cattle leader can take control of employees, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, devised a pair of tests. Cameron Anderson, an associate professor of organizational behavior and industrial relations, along with doctoral candidate Gavin Kilduff, recruited a group of 68 graduate students and divided them into four-person teams. To eliminate the wild card of gender, the teams were either all-male or all-female. Each group was given the task of organizing an imaginary nonprofit environmental organization; the group that did best — as determined by the researchers — would win a $400 prize. While the prize was real, the purported goal wasn't. What Anderson and Kilduff really wanted to see was how the alpha group members would emerge.

After the teams performed their work for a fixed amount of time, the members of each group rated one another on both their level of influence on the group and, more important, their level of competence. The work sessions were videotaped, and a group of independent observers performed the same evaluations, as did Anderson and Kilduff. All three sets of judges reached the same conclusions. Consistently, the group members who spoke up the most were rated the highest for such qualities as "general intelligence" and "dependable and self-disciplined." The ones who didn't speak as much tended to score higher for less desirable traits, including "conventional and uncreative."

"More-dominant individuals achieved influence in their groups in part because they were seen as more competent by fellow group members," Anderson and Kilduff write.

But so what? Maybe they were more competent. Isn't it possible that people who talk more do so because they simply have more to contribute? To test that, Anderson and Kilduff ran a second study with a new team of volunteers in which the skill being tested was a lot more quantifiable than forming a nonprofit green group. This time it was math.

Once again, the volunteers were divided into fours in competition for a $400 prize, but now their assigned task was to work as teams to solve computational problems from previous versions of the Graduate Management Aptitude Test (GMAT). Before the work began, the participants informed the researchers — but not their team members — of their real-world scores on the math portion of the SAT. When the work was finished, the people who spoke up more were again likelier to be described by peers as leaders and likelier to be rated as math whizzes. What's more, any speaking up at all seemed to do. Participants earned recognition for being the first to call out an answer, but also for being the second or third — even if all they did was agree with what someone else had said. Merely providing some scrap of information relevant to solving the problem counted too, as long as they did so often enough and confidently enough.

When Anderson and Kilduff checked the participants' work, however, a lot of pretenders were exposed. Repeatedly, the ones who emerged as leaders and were rated the highest in competence were not the ones who offered the greatest number of correct answers. Nor were they the ones whose SAT scores suggested they'd even be able to. What they did do was offer the most answers — period.

"Dominant individuals behaved in ways that made them appear competent," the researchers write, "above and beyond their actual competence." Troublingly, group members seemed only too willing to follow these underqualified bosses. An overwhelming 94% of the time, the teams used the first answer anyone shouted out — often giving only perfunctory consideration to others that were offered.

None of this comes as much of a shock — at least if you've been watching the news. You don't have to be a former homeowner burned by the housing fiasco or a blue-state voter screaming "I told you so" to agree that the way we pick our leaders is often based on something other than merit. That's not entirely bad, since no matter how competent bosses are, they still have to have the charisma and confidence to persuade people to follow them. Whether they're leading from the Oval Office or the corner office, it's up to the rest of us to watch them closely and make sure they know what they're doing and where they're going.

[nonesuche]

Link for above article in TIME
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1878358,00.html

[WhiskeyGirl]

My sister has suggested that some of the SAT people are "so smart, they're stupid".

Don't think about quality...just act first and yell the loudest.

Penny wise and pound foolish.

[nonesuche]

That's true and I have a boss currently, a new one, that yells non-stop and bludgeons her way through. She has many detractors and some have called her "rough around the edges".........it's an understatement.

My larger concern is the lack of accountability, whether it be within corporate leadership, or Wall Street, or banking, or the governing bodies and our political leaders. It seems if you can get away with it, then sobeit.

I heard Donald Trump being interviewed this morning regarding the questioning of the banking heads yesterday, he said it's all a Tarq farce for not one of these banks will loan $10 for a commercial deal currently. I'm not a Trump fan but when he, master of the slippy slide can't get a loan, that's pretty telling.

[WhiskeyGirl]

That's true and I have a boss currently, a new one, that yells non-stop and bludgeons her way through. She has many detractors and some have called her "rough around the edges".........it's an understatement.

My larger concern is the lack of accountability, whether it be within corporate leadership, or Wall Street, or banking, or the governing bodies and our political leaders. It seems if you can get away with it, then sobeit.

I heard Donald Trump being interviewed this morning regarding the questioning of the banking heads yesterday, he said it's all a Tarq farce for not one of these banks will loan $10 for a commercial deal currently. I'm not a Trump fan but when he, master of the slippy slide can't get a loan, that's pretty telling.

I did listen to Donald, and he's all about getting the best deal.  If he were in charge of the public purse for healthcare I would imagine, taxpayers would be getting the best deal possible.  I think he tries to maintain his reputation as a tough negotiator.

I think the corruption, under the guise of change, will only get worse.  Nothing is against the law of man, so the moral and ethical challenges will continue.

No hope for the next three or four years.  The 12-20 trillion dollar debt will take generations to pay off, long after Obama and others are out of office.

Poverty and dispair will be the lasting Obama legacy to America.

imho

[WhiskeyGirl]

...the U.S. government plans to do more than provide more tax cuts for rich people. It's also going to bail out the shareholders and executives of huge multinational corporations that wounded the economy in the first place, creating a new welfare program for the wealthy. We will need some kind of financial sector to support economic recovery, and freshly sworn-in Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner could take one of two reasonable routes to economic salvation: The Treasury could nationalize the major "too-big-to-fail" banks outright, or simply let them die and have the Federal Reserve fill the credit-shaped hole in the economy. Unfortunately, the Obama team appears ready to pump money into the banks and shield shareholders from losses that stem from some of the worst management decisions in business history.

These are the people we much share our 'success' with - the shareholders and managment of the big banks that failed.  No body wants any body to go without.

If Geithner and Co. orchestrate another bank bailout, however, we lose an opportunity to rebuild the U.S. economy that actually addresses the needs of individuals in an environmentally sustainable way..."Trying to solve the crisis with the same tools that caused it is the definition of insanity," Korten writes.

What happened to change?  The change that people 'overwhelmingly' voted for in November?  Was that thrown under the bus?

...the Obama administration has inherited a decimated manufacturing sector. It's currently propped up by a deeply flawed loan the Treasury Department extended to General Motors and Chrysler in December. Below is a segment from a four-part series on the auto bailout from The Real News. In it, Host Paul Jay notes that unions are being asked to take pay cuts as part of the effort to retool the Detroit car makers, even as decades of dreadful management decisions and poor environmental policy are being shut out of the public discussion.

Where is the bailout for manufacturing workers?  Lots of school loan money...not everyone will graduate high school or attend college or have the mental or physical capacity to compete with highly educated workers in India...

It's important to note that autoworkers' union could be helping cement the false perception that workers are responsible for Detroit's problems by agreeing to accept pay cuts as part of the bailout plan. Acquiescing to the demands of incompetent executives and opportunistic lawmakers also sets a terrible precedent for other stand-offs between CEOs and their employees. The millionaire managers who created the mess should be held accountable for the clean-up, not the factory workers who had the audacity to ask for health insurance.

I think the business has to be sustainable for workers and management.  Basic healthcare for everyone!

Something is terribly amiss when the most neglected members of society can't ask for help paying the bills, while even those protected by union contracts can't expect to have their health care costs covered...

All the biggest money seems to be doled out by the Federal Reserve, without reservations allowed by the masses...where's my billion dollar bailout?  Check in the mail?

The most important seem to be big banks, boards, politicians, and other special interest groups.

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/the_media_consortium/2009/02/weekly-audit-welfare-work-and.php

jmho