The prosocial side of power: How structural power over subordinates can promote social responsibility

Power corrupts (or does it?): An examination of the boundary conditions of the antisocial effects of experienced power

“…Building on this point, our review provides evidence that while individuals' perceptions of constraints increase powerholders' negative behaviors (e.g., Fast et al, ; Mooijman et al, ), actual constraints reduce negative behaviors (Rus et al, ) because they draw powerholders' attention to different aspects of the environment. These results coincide with findings by Tost and Johnson (), who found that structural power had a stronger effect on prosocial outcomes than psychological power. These findings offer evidence that powerholders' perceptions and mindsets may have fundamentally different effects on the way they understand and use their power than the objective features of the environment, and we encourage future research that explores this nuance and how it influences the way powerholders understand and use their power.…”

“…Consistent with this finding, Giurge, van Dijke, Zheng, and De Cremer (in press) found that powerholders were more likely to be cooperative and less likely to be self‐interested when they felt that their power was directed at other people rather than at the task environment. This finding is also consistent with Tost and Johnson's () finding that structural power can be more strongly related to other‐focused behaviors than psychological power, because when people have structural power over others, they become aware of their responsibility to look after them. In line with this perspective, Galinsky, Magee, Rus, Rothman, and Todd () found that when powerholders were able to take the perspective of others they engaged in higher levels of interactional justice.…”

“…It has been suggested that one way to reconcile the positive and negative behaviors associated with power is to consider moderators or boundary conditions (e.g., Guinote, ; Tost, Wade‐Benzoni, & Johnson, ). A variety of moderators have been found to shape the way people respond to power, including personality traits like moral identity (DeCelles et al, ) and narcissism (Mead, Baumeister, Stuppy, & Vohs, ), contextual factors like legitimacy (De Cremer & Van Dijk, ) and status (Fast, Halevy, & Galinsky, ), as well as other factors such as the source or stability of one's power (Lammers, Galinsky, Gordijn, & Otten, ; Tost & Johnson, ) and whether one thinks of power as a responsibility or an opportunity (Sassenberg, Ellemers, & Scheepers, ). In order to carefully consider boundary conditions for the effects of power experiences, it is important to identify categories of moderators.…”

“…We present evidence for each moderator category separately, but we also describe an integrated perspective that argues for a more nuanced view on power. While power studies tend to focus on the amount of power one has (or the presence/absence of power), recent perspectives have argued that “power can refer to different things, which in turn have different effects” (Lammers, Stoker, & Stapel, , p. 1543), suggesting that the way one construes power may be especially impactful in understanding how they will use it (Tost & Johnson, ). This suggests that rather than being inherently negative, it may be that “power cannot be reduced to a single form” (Guinote, , p. 355), and that it may be particularly important to understand not only how much power one has, but also how they construe or conceptualize that power.…”

“…Power not only changes how individuals see and feel about others, but also changes how they treat others, causing them to be more likely to engage in negative behaviors towards others, such as abuse (Foulk, Lanaj, Tu, Erez, & Archambeau, 2018), objectification (Gruenfeld, Inesi, Magee, & Galinsky, 2008), and aggression (Zimbardo, 1973). In summarizing the current state of the research on the social implications of power, Fleming and Spicer (2014) recently indicated that "power generally has negative connotations when it comes to understanding organizational life" (p. 3), and Tost and Johnson (2019) suggested that this "antisocial view may predominate" the power literature (p. 26).…”