Abstract
Personal distress is a building block of empathy, yet has received scant attention in studies of individual differences in leadership. We investigate whether the effect of leader emergence on men's distress is influenced by their personalized power motive (p Power) and changes in their testosterone (T) and cortisol (C) levels. In an experiment involving 96 males, p Power modulated the direction and intensity of T change in emergent leaders, with high p-Power leaders showing a more positive T change compared to their low p-Power counterparts. We also conducted a dynamic test of the dual-hormone hypothesis in which participants' changes in T and C interacted to produce differences in personal distress. Contrary to expectations, positive changes in T were associated with increased distress at negative changes in C. Given that high T and low C are associated with leadership, we explain these findings and question the assumption that personal distress represents a shortcoming in leaders.
Highlights
Leader emergence is the extent to which someone is viewed as a leader by others who possess limited knowledge of that individual’s performance [1], and it results either from one’s ascribed physical and dispositional traits or through achievements that signal competence [2]
Given the plethora of research on outcomes of leader emergence employing nonbiological mechanisms, we argue that the hormonal mechanism explored here is a missing piece in understanding how an empathic outcome like personal distress may become manifest
We created another measure of personalized power motive (p Power) (p Power ) which is the standardized residual when regressing p Power on the manipulation condition
Summary
Leader emergence is the extent to which someone is viewed as a leader by others who possess limited knowledge of that individual’s performance [1], and it results either from one’s ascribed physical and dispositional traits or through achievements that signal competence [2]. Scholars have argued that prospective male leaders are expected to be dominant (or agentic) and female leaders to be empathic (or communal) because cultural norms shape the behavior of each sex into a set of learned social roles [6]. This conceptualization, is limiting for several reasons.
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