Preferences for changing power positions and power distances: a social value orientations approach

Abstract

Participants were asked to put themselves in the position of one of three persons who differed in the amount of power they had in a small work unit. Subsequently, they could allocate points on a power scale to themselves and the two others, and thus, change the power positions and the power distances between the positions. The least powerful individuals had the strongest tendency to increase their power. They wanted to reduce the power distance to the person in the higher position more than the power distance to the person in the middle position. The most powerful wanted to increase the power distance to the person in the middle position but not the power distance to the least powerful. Most results were consistent with social comparison theory and contrary to power distance theory. Because the dependent measures were derived from the social value orientations model, the scope of this model has been expanded. Copyright # 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Many relationships, groups, and organizations are stratified because people differ in how much power they have. Bosses usually have more power than foremen and foremen usually have more power than workers. Often people want to change the power differences. Understanding power dynamics is an important element of understanding the functioning of relationships, groups, and organizations. In this article we will focus on two theories which explain why and how people want to change power differences. One theory, power distance theory, has been developed especially for understanding people's preferences to change power differences. The other, social comparison theory, is a more general theory that can be applied to preferences for changing power differences. Because some of the hypotheses which can be derived from the two theories are contradictory, an experiment will be described in which some hypotheses were refuted and others supported. In power dynamics, several tendencies-e.g. a tendency to change one's absolute power and a tendency to change one's relative power (compared to that of another person)-are entangled. To disentangle these tendencies methods were borrowed from research on social value orientations. The central aim of this article is to evaluate the two theories with respect to power dynamics. Further, we hope to demonstrate that the social value orientations paradigm is a useful framework to study interpersonal phenomena such as social power.

Striving for personal power as a basis for social power dynamics

“…This corroborates existing research (Poppe, 2003;Van Dijke & Poppe, 2003, 2004) by means of a new power operationalization. More importantly, we showed that people attempt to change the power difference to their advantage by decreasing their dependence on others' power, to increase their personal power.…”

“…Results of Van Dijke and Poppe (2004; see also Poppe, 2003;Van Dijke & Poppe, 2003) support the notions of Tjosvold et al (1991) and Kotter (1978Kotter ( , 1985, that people sometimes increase their social power when it is instrumental for an increase of their personal power. In this study, like in the studies by Wilke (1992, 1993) and Mulder and his colleagues (Mulder, Veen, Hartsuiker, & Westerduin, 1971;Mulder, Veen, Hijzen, & Jansen, 1973;Mulder, Veen, Rodenburg, Frenken, & Tielens, 1973), participants worked together with others in a hierarchical group.…”

“…Apparently, people move upwards in hierarchies out of a striving for personal power, by decreasing their dependence on others, rather than out of a striving for social power. Obviously, we don't claim that people never increase their social power; that would deny the reality of groups and organizations and also the results of Van Dijke and Poppe (2004;see also Van Dijke & Poppe, 2003;Poppe, 2003). However, the present results support the interpretation that the participants in these studies, just as people often do in real life, strived for an advantage in social power, because that advantage is instrumental in increasing and securing their personal power, and not because they value social power in itself (see also Emerson, 1962;Kotter, 1978Kotter, , 1985Willer, 1992).…”

“…To obtain indices of the participants' tendencies to change their social power and their personal power, we used a method adapted from the assessment of social value orientations (Grzelak, Bobrowski, Ossewska, & Wyszogrodzki, 1994;see Van Lange & Kuhlman, 1994, for a related procedure), which was first applied to power settings by Poppe (2003). A social value orientation is a preference for allocating outcomes (e.g., money, evaluation points) to self and others.…”

ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR Conference Paper Abstracts.

“…As has been shown in number of studies (Poppe, 2003;Van Dijke & Poppe, 2004), people try to accumulate more power in relation to others on the same hierarchical level, also as a means to distinguish themselves from others. However, this tendency decreases if power differences in groups are recognized in terms of hierarchical differences.…”