The last few years have seen an admirable attempt by many organizations to democratize power and decision making, thus giving agency to employees that previously had none.

Whilst this is indeed admirable, and in many cases eminently sensible, a recent study does urge a degree of caution.  The study set out to explore how people who are usually powerless respond when they are given a degree of agency.  They found that our reaction to power tends to change significantly depending upon whether we’ve had it in the past or not.

Power at work

Participants were asked to think of a time when they felt powerful.  Roughly 10% of the group reported no such instances, and were thus tagged as the low power segment.

Participants were then placed in a scenario whereby they were either managing someone at work, or merely a colleague of them.  In other words, some of the group were given power, others were not.  They were then asked whether they would behave unethically towards that person in a number of ways.

Interestingly, the data revealed that those who had little power previously were much more likely to behave badly when they were given power than those for whom power was more normal.

For instance, the newly empowered would restrict the possibilities of their charges to progress and generally act rather vindictively towards them.

What’s more, such individuals would also be more likely to conduct themselves in a manner typically associated with harassment.

Now, of course, it isn’t perhaps quite so easy to determine causation or correlation here.  It could, for instance, simply be that people who behave badly tend to have less power as a result.  It would be dangerous therefore to assume that powerless will naturally lead to inappropriate behavior, but given that we have studied at length the impact power has on our behavior, it is nonetheless an interesting finding, especially as organizations are doing their best to distribute power towards those that may not previously have had any.