Michael Jordon famously remarked that “Republicans buy sneakers too”, and while he later revealed that it was said largely in jest, it does nonetheless illustrate the difficulty in taking a stand on issues when that may alienate key stakeholders. Yet research from the University of Bath suggests that’s increasingly what we expect from our leaders.
The study highlights how both employees and even job seekers increasingly want their leaders to not only exhibit the right actions, but speak up on the political themes that matter to them.
Indeed, job seekers are around 20% more likely to want to work for a company whose CEO takes a humanistic stance on various political issues, especially if the issue is unrelated to their core business. What’s more, this was true regardless of the political orientation, age, education level, or gender of the job seeker. Indeed, they didn’t even need to agree with the CEO’s view for the boost to occur.
“We had expected people to be attracted to principled, politically active business leaders but we were surprised to find that graduates did not necessarily need to share their opinions to find them appealing,” the researchers explain. “Employees want their CEOs to take the more liberal, humanistic stand whatever their own position might be. It seems CEO principles are counting for more and more in today’s jobs market.”
Speaking up
Speaking up can often be easier said than done, however, especially if the topic you’re talking about is a controversial one that divides opinion. Research from the Kellogg School explores what prompts people to speak up regardless of such risks.
The researchers focused on rationales, which are the stories we use to support our perspectives on a given topic. These narratives might be used to try and persuade others of the merits of our position, but they’re also used to try and make something that might seem unpalatable a little bit more acceptable. In other words, it’s a social justification for a belief we have that may not be acceptable to others.
The researchers found that rationales are often extremely effective in terms of emboldening us to share opinions that we might ordinarily keep to ourselves. Indeed, our rationales are often also effective in shaping how our audience interprets those opinions.
“We show that liberals are more willing to post a Tweet opposing the movement to defund the police, are seen as less prejudiced, and face lower social sanctions when their Tweet implies they had first read credible scientific evidence supporting their position,” the researchers explain. “Our findings highlight both the power of rationales and their limitations in enabling dissent and shed light on phenomena such as social movements, political correctness, propaganda, and anti-minority behavior.”
Shaping perceptions
This ability to shape perceptions is important, as the Bath research showed that a greater degree of political engagement can encourage new recruits, but it is still not without a large degree of risk, as principles in and of themselves are not enough. They have to be the right principles.
“Interestingly, our findings show that the positive effect of CEO activism disappears if the CEO becomes politically active to oppose humanistic values, such as when leaders speak up against same-sex marriage,” the authors explain. “People are more likely to want to work for a company with a CEO that takes no stand whatsoever than one where he or she comes out against such issues. It seems that when CEOs speak up, they should speak up for humanistic values if they want to have a positive spill-over effect for their company.”
The Kellogg research suggests that rationales can help to overcome some of these challenges, and the study found that using a rationale significantly increased the likelihood that our audience will think well of us. This matters, especially as the researchers found that the rationale doesn’t have to be persuasive to be effective. Instead, they just need to be sufficiently convincing for the audience to believe someone else could have been convinced.
In other words, rationales make it harder for the audience to infer the real reason we may hold a certain point of view because they introduce a degree of noise into our calculations. Indeed, it’s this same muddying of the water that helps to explain why misinformation is so powerful online.
So, if you want to be speaking up on matters but are unsure of just how your audience might receive your views, make sure you have a rationale to support them. That way you stand a better chance of coming off well even to those who ideologically disagree with you.
