Abstract
Although risk decision-making plays an important role in leadership practice, the distinction in behavior between humans with differing levels of leadership, as well as the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms involved, remain unclear. In this study, the Ultimatum Game (UG) was utilized in concert with electroencephalograms (EEG) to investigate the temporal course of cognitive and emotional processes involved in economic decision-making between high and low leadership level college students. Behavioral results from this study found that the acceptance rates in an economic transaction, when the partner was a computer under unfair/sub unfair condition, were significantly higher than in transactions with real human partners for the low leadership group, while there was no significant difference in acceptance rates for the high leadership group. Results from Event-Related Potentials (ERP) analysis further indicated that there was a larger P3 amplitude in the low leadership group than in the high leadership group. We concluded that the difference between high and low leadership groups was at least partly due to their different emotional management abilities.
Highlights
Leadership, which is commonly defined as a process of influence used in setting direction, building an inspiring vision, and creating something new to motivate organization members toward goal achievement (Yukl, 1999; Clarkson et al, 2019), is one of the most traditionally researched concepts in the behavioral sciences
Loerakker and van Winden (2017) found emotional leadership played an important role in an intergroup conflict game experiment. All of these findings indicate the impact of leadership level on decision-making
We aimed to explore high and low leadership level college students’ performance in the Ultimatum Game (UG); concurrently, an Event-Related Potentials (ERP) technique was utilized to examine brain activity during the decision-making process
Summary
Leadership, which is commonly defined as a process of influence used in setting direction, building an inspiring vision, and creating something new to motivate organization members toward goal achievement (Yukl, 1999; Clarkson et al, 2019), is one of the most traditionally researched concepts in the behavioral sciences. Given that we live in highly complex social environments, a leader must be able to inspire followers to strive for organizational goals, but must know how to handle conflicts in decision making. The leader’s risk decisionmaking ability has been a highly researched topic in the areas of management, economics, and academic psychology. The topics of leadership and risk decision-making have been well studied in economics. The topics of leadership and risk decision-making have been well studied in economics. Russ et al (1996) found that low-performing sales managers behaved more avoidantly and irrationally
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