Want to look competent? Get in touch with your dominant side. In a recent study, University of California, Berkley researchers found those who act more dominantly are perceived as more competent, even when they aren’t.
Organizational behavior and industrial relations Associate Professor Cameron Anderson and doctoral candidate Gavin Kilduff tested their “great pretender” theory on 17 four-student teams. They gave each team 45 minutes to design a mock non-profit environmental organization or a for-profit Web site. The winning team would receive a $400 prize. More importantly, the experiment required each participant to rate his or her colleagues’ level of influence on the group, and each participant’s level of competence.
The results: Team members with the most dominant personalities were rated the highest for such qualities as general intelligence, dependability, and self-discipline. Less outspoken workers were perceived as having less desirable traits, giving them high scores for being conventional and uncreative.
To be fair, Anderson and Kilduff wanted to give the alpha standouts the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps these newly anointed leaders were indeed more competent. A second experiment left no debate. In Round Two, researchers asked the teams to solve computational problems taken from old versions of the Graduate Management Aptitude Test (GMAT). Participants reported their previous SAT math scores before trying to solve the GMAT problems.
When it was time to reveal the answers out loud, the people who spoke up more were, again, the ones teammates deemed as leaders of the group. It didn’t matter if the chosen leaders offered the correct answers, only that they offered more responses.
What’s more, the leaders didn’t even have to provide their solutions to be exalted as the top of the heap.
Anderson and Kilduff’s work redefines what it means to be dominant in the context of influence. Past studies have aligned dominant behavior with aggressive, heavy handed tactics. This study found dominant people attain influence by displaying competence, they said.
While the findings may trouble some, they may be helpful to managers who want to look a little closer when judging their employees’ true productivity and value. The s results may also help individuals achieve improvement in their own reputations – just by speaking up, the researchers conclude.
– Dona DeZube
