Hierarchy is such a defining feature of organizations that its forms and basic functions are often taken for granted in organizational research. In this chapter, we revisit some basic sociological and psychological elements of hierarchy to explain why hierarchy is so pervasive across groups and...

Three experiments demonstrated that the experience of power leads to an illusion of personal control. Regardless of whether power was experientially primed (Experiments 1 and 3) or manipulated through manager-subordinate roles (Experiment 2), it led to perceived control over outcomes that were...

Three experiments demonstrated that the experience of power leads to an illusion of personal control. Regardless of whether power was experientially primed (Experiments 1 and 3) or manipulated through manager-subordinate roles (Experiment 2), it led to perceived control over outcomes that were...

The impact of newcomer's social similarity and opinion agreement with old timers is examined. Much of the research about newcomers has ignored the role of social similarity, generally conflating newcomer status with out-group status. The current investigation addresses this confound by...

At the time of its publication, the Approach/Inhibition Theory of Power (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003) was a major advance in the study of power, and it has generated many empirical discoveries. The theory states that by reducing one’s dependence on others, high power activates...

This paper examines how power influences human behavior. We consider evidence from diverse literatures relating elevated power to approach and reduced power to inhibition. Specifically, power is associated with (a) positive affect, (b) attention to rewards and to features of others that satisfy...

Cultures might differ when they lose control and seek to regain it. Two experiments explored whether threats to control affected participants’ willingness to believe personality feedback from a horoscope. We found that lack of control increased the degree to which people in Western, but not...

We suggest that power enables individuals to defy obstacles in their environment and continue to pursue their goals, unfettered by constraints. The first two experiments test whether the powerful defy instructions from authority (Experiment 1) and ignore social constraints against helping in...

Though women have increasingly reached parity with men in terms of degrees earned, they remain under-represented in many fields of employment (e.g., STEM) and in the upper levels of management. Diversity training programs are now common in most organizations, yet even if the more overt forms of...