What is the problem/issue being addressed?
The corporate world, the military, politics, and others all rely on skilful leadership to optimize their potential, unite followers, reduce conflict, and distil the various centrifugal forces within organizations into success. While the positive forms of leadership – the traditional focus of leadership research – make individuals, organizations, and societies flourish, negative forms of leadership have devastating consequences. This negative impact is magnified psychologically due to the fact that humans perceive and process negative input more elaborately than positive input (density hypothesis) and that negative behavior generally is more harmful than positive behavior is helpful (bad is stronger than good phenomenon). Destructive leadership does not only negatively affect the direct target but also indirectly affects the target’s environment (kicking-the-dog phenomenon). This immense and widespread negative impact necessitates nuanced empirical investigations into root causes as well as moderating contextual factors in order to better understand how individuals and organizations can react to and /or prevent destructive leadership. Recent critique stresses that models on destructive leadership should on the one hand avoid unnecessary construct proliferation and on the other hand attempt a holistic conceptualization, where constructs, antecedents, and consequences should be investigated on the level of leaders, followers, and the environment alike. The current project aimed at advancing research on destructive leadership by i) conceptually identifying current challenges and potential solutions, ii) adapting and developing paradigms which enable to study leadership in the laboratory and with novel technologies, and iii) then using those paradigms to study the cognitive und neural underpinnings of (destructive) leadership.
Why is it important for society?
To overcome current socio-political challenges, Europe needs strong leaders, whether this be in political, corporate, or societal contexts. One of the 2016/2017 Horizon2020 societal challenges defined by the EU is focused on ‘Europe in a changing world’. We need to foster inclusive, innovative, and reflective societies. Our societies, however, can only be as reflective as their leaders. European leaders are under considerable strain, considering fast changes rooted in globalisation, migration, the economic crisis, and digitalisation. We, thus, need to support our leaders by putting them on our scientific map and helping them to develop sound self-reflection skills. The proposed project will do exactly that and, further, open up a multitude of possibilities to translate the outcome into directly applicable intervention strategies.
What are the overall objectives?
This project worked at the forefront of translating classic leadership research to the laboratory. We i) compiled conceptual work which points out why current shortcomings in leadership theory necessitate the inclusion of experimental and neuroscientific methodology into the canon of leadership research, ii) developed and adapt experimental paradigms to fit leadership content, and iii) used those newly developed experimental setups using novel technologies (including social robotics) to study the psychophysiological underpinnings of differential leadership behaviour (for detailed list of concrete outcome, exploitation, and dissemination see below).
