The impact of leader dominance on employees’ zero-sum mindset and helping behavior.

Abstract

Leaders strive to encourage helping behaviors among employees, as it positively affects both organizational and team effectiveness. However, the manner in which a leader influences others can unintentionally limit this desired behavior. Drawing on social learning theory, we contend that a leader's tendency to influence others via dominance could decrease employees' interpersonal helping. Dominant leaders, who influence others by being assertive and competitive, shape their subordinates' cognitive schema of success based on zero-sum thinking. Employees with a zero-sum mindset are more likely to believe that they can only make progress at the expense of others. We further propose that this zero-sum mindset results in less interpersonal helping among subordinates. We test our hypotheses by employing different operationalizations of our key variables in eight studies of which four are reported in the manuscript and another four in supplementary information (SI) across a combined sample of 147,780 observations. These studies include a large archival study, experiments with both laboratory and online samples, and a time-lagged field study with employees from 50 different teams. Overall, this research highlights the unintended consequences that dominant leaders have on their followers' helping behavior by increasing their zero-sum mindset.

“Do not teach them how to fish”: The effect of zero-sum beliefs on help giving.

“…This suggests that zero-sum beliefs may have two independent effects on help giving, suppressing people’s overall willingness to help while also shifting their preference away from autonomy-oriented help and toward dependency-oriented help. In contrast to past findings (Kakkar & Sivanathan, 2021; Sirola & Pitesa, 2017), zero-sum beliefs do not seem to dampen people’s willingness to give dependency-oriented help. Thus, depending on the type of help they are asked to give, zero-sum thinkers may be equally likely (or even more so) to help.…”

“…In contrast, zero-sum beliefs were not related to participants’ willingness to give their colleague a complete solution to their problem, B = −.062, SE = .148, t (128) = −.422, p = .674, or prepare the presentation for them, B = .085, SE = .142, t (128) = .598, p = .551, and only marginally related to the willingness to resolve the issue for them as a one-time favor, B = .306, SE = .157, t (128) = 1.951, p = .053. Finally, replicating past findings (Kakkar & Sivanathan, 2021; Sirola & Pitesa, 2017), zero-sum beliefs predicted participants’ refusal to help, as measured by the three filler items, B = .385, SE = .100, t (128) = 3.85, p = .0002. Thus, although participants who believed that success is zero-sum were generally less willing to help their colleagues, this reluctance was only reflected in their willingness to give autonomy-oriented, but not dependency-oriented, help.…”

“…Unfortunately, research on the negative effects of zero-sum beliefs on help giving is lacking, leaving clear gaps in the literature. To date, only two articles directly examined how zero-sum beliefs impact help giving, finding that even when it does not affect one’s productivity, such beliefs reduce people’s willingness to help (Kakkar & Sivanathan, 2021; Sirola & Pitesa, 2017). Yet, because this research did not distinguish among different types of helping behaviors (Nadler, 2020), it is unclear whether zero-sum beliefs obstruct all types of helping and, if so, why.…”

Where you come from matters: Cultural differences in mobility perceptions and status judgments

“…It is possible that cultural differences based on familial social class backgrounds might play a different role in status-related judgments at work with negative outcomes. For example, other research has shown that a leader's level in behavioural dominance influences perceivers' judgments of their ambiguous moral transgressions (Kakkar et al, 2020) or team-members' zero-sum perceptions (Kakkar & Sivanathan, 2021). Future research should extend the here reported cultural differences of status-related judgments to social contexts beyond work.…”

The implementation of reality counseling to overcome students’ isolated behavior

“…Dominating other people. Students seek to control others by being confident and assertive about their point of view and sometimes forcing others (Kakkar & Sivanathan, 2021). 3.…”