Word: kilduff
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...determine just how easily an all-hat-no-cattle leader can take control of employees, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, devised a pair of tests. Cameron Anderson, an associate professor of organizational behavior and industrial relations, along with doctoral candidate Gavin Kilduff, recruited a group of 68 graduate students and divided them into four-person teams. To eliminate the wild card of gender, the teams were either all-male or all-female. Each group was given the task of organizing an imaginary nonprofit environmental organization; the group that did best - as determined by the researchers - would...
...fixed amount of time, the members of each group rated one another on both their level of influence on the group and, more important, their level of competence. The work sessions were videotaped, and a group of independent observers performed the same evaluations, as did Anderson and Kilduff. All three sets of judges reached the same conclusions. Consistently, the group members who spoke up the most were rated the highest for such qualities as "general intelligence" and "dependable and self-disciplined." The ones who didn't speak as much tended to score higher for less desirable traits, including "conventional...
...More-dominant individuals achieved influence in their groups in part because they were seen as more competent by fellow group members," Anderson and Kilduff write. (See pictures of Steve Jobs...
...what? Maybe they were more competent. Isn't it possible that people who talk more do so because they simply have more to contribute? To test that, Anderson and Kilduff ran a second study with a new team of volunteers in which the skill being tested was a lot more quantifiable than forming a nonprofit green group. This time it was math. (See entrepreneurs breaking ground in global business...
When Anderson and Kilduff checked the participants' work, however, a lot of pretenders were exposed. Repeatedly, the ones who emerged as leaders and were rated the highest in competence were not the ones who offered the greatest number of correct answers. Nor were they the ones whose SAT scores suggested they'd even be able to. What they did do was offer the most answers - period...