Powerful people (e.g., political and business leaders) should be able to control their impulses and act in line with long-term rather than short-term interests. However, theories of power suggest different answers to the question whether the basic experience of feeling powerful decreases (e.g., Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003) or increases self-control performance (e.g., Magee & Smith, 2013). We conducted a preregistered direct replication of the only experiment testing the effects of power on self-control (Joshi & Fast, 2013, Study 3). In contrast to the original results, social power, operationalized by episodic priming, did not affect temporal discounting. A possible explanation is the fact that the power priming failed to elevate participants' sense of power. Thus, the null findings challenge the power priming paradigm rather than the two theories from which opposite predictions were derived. In order to understand how power affects self-control, future research may need to rely on other manipulations. Keywords: Social power; self-control; power priming; temporal discounting; direct replication How does feeling powerful prepare individuals for exercising self-control, i.e. to pursue long-term goals? Laypeople seem to agree that powerful people such as organizational or political leaders should be particularly persistent, disciplined, and responsible (Lord, Foti, & Vader, 1984). Two influential theories in power research -the approach/ inhibition theory of power (Keltner et al., 2003) and the social distance theory of power (Magee & Smith, 2013) -make opposite predictions with regard to the effects of power on self-control.Within the framework of the approach/inhibition theory of power, Keltner and colleagues suggest that (1) high power activates the behavioral approach system which is sensitive to rewards and opportunities, and (2) low power activates the behavioral inhibition system which is sensitive to punishment, threat, and uncertainty. Briefly summarized, Keltner and colleagues propose that high power triggers approach-related positive affect, attention to rewards, automatic cognition, and disinhibited behavior, whereas reduced power activates inhibition-related negative affect, systematic cognition, and situationally constrained behavior. Accordingly, due to their heightened attention to rewards and their drive to experience these rewards immediately, powerful people should show relatively poor self-control.In contrast, the social distance theory of power (Magee & Smith, 2013) assumes that high-power individuals exhibit better self-control than low-power individuals. Magee and Smith propose that asymmetric dependence between two individuals gives rise to asymmetric experiences of social distance, with the high-power individual feeling more subjective distance than the low-power individual. Based on assumptions of construal level theory (Trope & Liberman, 2010), the authors assume that because highpower individuals perceive larger social distance, they engage in more abstract mental representatio...

Seven studies involving 1,343 participants showed how circumplex models of social motives can help explain individual differences in preferences for status (having others' admiration) versus power (controlling valuable resources). Studies 1 to 3 and 7 concerned interpersonal motives in workplace contexts, and found that stronger communal motives (to have mutual trust, support, and cooperation) predicted being more attracted to status (but not power) and achieving more workplace status, while stronger agentic motives (to be firm, decisive, and influential) predicted being more attracted to and achieving more workplace power, and experiencing a stronger connection between workplace power and job satisfaction. Studies 4 to 6 found similar effects for intergroup motives: Stronger communal motives predicted wanting one's ingroup (e.g., country) to have status-but not power-relative to other groups. Finally, most people preferred status over power, and this was especially true for women, which was partially explained by women having stronger communal motives.

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Experimental research conducted with student participants has documented that feeling powerful or powerless (psychological power) affects outcomes with high practical relevance for organizations. However, it is unclear how results from these studies can be generalized to organizational settings in which individuals have various roles that imply more or less objective power. To address this gap, we present a theoretical framework to aid in the understanding of how objective power in organizations affects psychological power. We assume that stable differences in organizational rank (i.e., structural power) determine the likelihood of interactions with superiors, subordinates, or peers. These interactions give rise to within-person variation in situational power which should lead to dynamic fluctuations of psychological power and eventually its outcomes. Results of a preregistered experiment (n = 190 participants) and a preregistered experience sampling study (n = 129 participants) conducted with working adults support our key predictions:Structural power was associated with the likelihood of being in a high power versus low power situation. Within-person differences in situational power were related to feelings of power such as judgments about (1) one's own ability to influence others in a given social situation (i.e., interpersonal power) and (2) one's own competence, agency, autonomy, and independence (i.e., personal power).

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