Leadership & Organizational Behavior

Two experiments investigated the hypothesis that strategic behavioral mimicry can facilitate negotiation outcomes. Study 1 used an employment negotiation with multiple issues, and demonstrated that strategic behavioral mimicry facilitated outcomes at both the individual and dyadic levels: Negotiators who mimicked the mannerisms of their opponents both secured better individual outcomes, and their dyads as a whole also performed better when mimicking occurred compared to when it did not.

Hierarchy is such a defining and pervasive feature of organizations that its forms and basic functions are often taken for granted in organizational research. In this review, we revisit some basic psychological and sociological elements of hierarchy and argue that status and power are two important yet distinct bases of hierarchical differentiation. We first define power and status and distinguish our definitions from previous conceptualizations. We then integrate a number of different literatures to explain why status and power hierarchies tend to be self-reinforcing.

Four experiments explored whether lacking power impairs executive functioning, testing the hypothesis that the cognitive presses of powerlessness increase vulnerability to performance decrements during complex executive tasks. In the first three experiments, low power impaired performance on executive-function tasks: The powerless were less effective than the powerful at updating (Experiment 1), inhibiting (Experiment 2), and planning (Experiment 3).

We present six experiments that tested whether lacking control increases illusory pattern perception, which we define as the identification of a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of random or unrelated stimuli. Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions.

Research has yielded weak empirical support for the idea that creative solutions may be discovered through unconscious thought, despite anecdotes to this effect. To understand this gap, we examined the effect of unconscious thought on two outcomes of a remote-association test (RAT): implicit accessibility and conscious reporting of answers.

This chapter examines the relationship between the related yet distinct constructs of power and leadership. Although power (asymmetric control over valued resources) is often a foundation of leadership (influencing and motivating a group of individuals towards a common goal), we consider power to be neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the emergence of leadership. We distinguish power from leadership along a number of dimensions and highlight that the relationship of power to leadership lies in power's psychological effects.

We examine the association between CEO reputation (proxied by the extent of press coverage) and the quality of the firm's earnings (proxied by two accruals-based measures). We test three explanations for an association between these constructs: the efficient contracting hypothesis suggests that reputed CEOs are associated with good earnings quality, while the rent extraction and matching explanations argue that reputed CEOs are associated with poor earnings quality.

Consider an economy in which the underlying security returns follow a linear factor model with constant coeffcients. While portfolios that invest in these securities will, in general, have a linear factor structure, it will be one with time-varying coeffcients. However, under certain assumptions regarding the portfolio's investment strategy, it is possible to estimate these time-varying alphas and betas.