Leadership: Leaders, Followers, Environments by Art Padilla

Author:Art Padilla [Art Padilla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business, Personal & Professional Development
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

Corrupt leaders can corrupt followers

As the tenures of leaders increase, some followers are more likely to adopt their behaviors. Imitation from higher status to lower status team members is common. Leader emotions and behaviors, like the flu, are contagious. They affect followers in organizational settings.62 Some work has been done on emotion contagion, though little empirical research has been conducted about behavior contagion in the leadership literature. There are, however, several areas of related work that provide helpful insights: social learning theory, displaced aggression theory, and Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority.63

First, research supports the notion that behavior is contagious.64 When we observe or experience the behavior of others, good or bad, we learn from it.65 Some of us copy it, some of us ignore it, and yet others reject it. New leaders quickly learn that their every move and every word are seemingly dissected. Their explanations about events are repeated at the water cooler, and their clothing habits are noticed and even copied. This theory applies to ethical situations in groups and organizations.66 One study, for example, found that abusive supervision engendered counterproductive behavior by employees in restaurants. Second, displaced aggression studies suggest that followers who are treated poorly by leaders tend to displace their anger on others.67 Unethical or improper behaviors might then be redirected toward more available employees such as subordinates or coworkers. Abusive supervision appears to be significantly related to abusive behavior toward coworkers.68 Third, obedience to authority studies demonstrate that authority figures can sway followers to act unethically. In Milgram’s controversial experiments, the subject was a “teacher” instructed by the researcher to administer electrical shocks to a “learner” who was an accomplice or co-conspirator with the researcher in the experiment. A majority of the subjects delivered the highest levels of shocks to the learner despite the learner’s protests and claims of health problems. In almost all cases, the researcher in these situations initially was seen as a legitimate, knowledgeable authority figure.69 Followers found it difficult to change their beliefs that a positive authority figure was a bad leader, even when faced with significant information suggesting that the authority figure (the researcher) was encouraging cruel and abusive behavior.

LEADERSHIP SPOTLIGHT

The dark side of whistle-blowing

Is whistle-blowing always a good thing, or is there a dark side to it? We often see the whistle-blowers treated as celebrities and heroes in lecture halls filled to capacity or in front of the U.S. Congress testifying about evil, greed, and wrongdoing by big corporations and organizations. Some, like Cynthia Cooper of Worldcom, Coleen Rowley of the FBI, and Sherron Watkins of Enron, are picked by magazines as Person of the Year, and deservedly so. Others, like Roger Boisjoly, the mechanical engineer who raised objections to the launching of the doomed space shuttle, the Challenger, recovered after a long period of illness and stress to become a sought-after lecturer at universities and speaker on workplace ethics. For his honesty and courage, the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science awarded Boisjoly the Prize for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility in 2006.

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