Warning: Powerlessness May Be Dangerous to Your Brain – and Your Business

Scary reading this morning and it wasn’t on page one of the any of my Sunday papers: Dip in brainpower may follow drop in real power on the World Science site.

The re­search­ers, reporting in Psychological Science, con­ducted three ex­pe­ri­ments, putting Dutch uni­ver­s­ity stu­dents in dif­fer­ent sce­nar­i­os de­signed to make them feel ei­ther dom­i­nant or sub­or­di­nate in “rank”. They were then asked to perform think­ing tests, such as puzzles. The “pow­erless” ones had trouble plan­ning, up­dat­ing a men­tal pic­ture and ignor­ing ir­rel­e­vant in­forma­t­ion, the authors reported, attributing this to the fact that low power people are not expected to fo­cus on the over­all goals. Con­sist­ent with this interpretation, were the results of a fourth ex­pe­ri­ment us­ing a game de­signed so that it would re­main easy to fo­cus on the task goal. It wasn’t mo­tiva­t­ion that was the problem. The less powerful participants re­ported put­ting in as much ef­fort as oth­ers, the re­search­ers said.

Whatever happened to the idea of empowering workers? Especially now when competition for human capital is high and predicted to rise? Yet more and more I hear people talk about structuring jobs to be exactly what is needed – forget what the employee needs. Wake up call:organizations can’t afford to play zero-sum games any more. Command and control just takes those human capital assets and chews them into tiny bits of useless action, uncoordinated by any Vision. And apparently the effect is long lasting.

I want a smarter world, one with more Vision, more power, more mastery, more innovation, more excellence. Ok, that may not motivate you. But what if all those people whose brains lost power because of managerial abuse put in Workers Comp claims?