As my BNET colleague Jeffrey Pfeffer wrote last week, despite the conventional wisdom, change for change’s sake is often harmful or worse for organizational performance. It can be tempting to bring in new leaders from outside a company under the “change or die” mantra. But those newcomers might let their egos get in the way as they try to put their stamp on an organization. Big new ideas often flop and costs (plus cynicism) increase. More often than not, it’s best to simply improve upon what already works well within an organization.
On the flip side, while outsiders might have a harder time understanding an organization’s strengths, insiders tend to perpetuate the weaknesses of their predecessors. That’s according to a new joint study by researchers at Kellogg and Northwestern who found that if “new decision makers share a psychological connection with an initial decision maker, they may invest further in the failing programs of the first - even to their own financial detriment.”
Their experiment found that even the most arbitrary psychological connections (what they dub “vicarious entrapment”) influenced one’s ability to make independent decisions:
If the delegated decision maker was even subtly connected to the original - by sharing similar attributes like the same birthday or simply empathizing with the first decision maker, for example - he/she honored the original decision maker’s commitments and made further investments in that person’s losing decisions…
“Research has shown that once a psychological connection forms between two individuals, they are more likely to cooperate and favor each other financially,” said Adam Galinsky, the Morris and Alice Kaplan Professor of Ethics and Decision in Management at the Kellogg School. “The current research suggests that they are also more likely to escalate on each others’ failing decisions.”
The study’s authors argue that when a company really needs to right its ship, a true outsider without any connections to prior leadership might be the best person for the job. From your own experiences, please share whether you think that strategy is correct in the comments section below.
