Company Managers Who Are Incompetent Prefer Incompetent Employees, Says New Study

According to a scientific study conducted by the University of Granada (UGR) in Spain and the University of Lovaina in Belgium that was reported earlier in October but released for public information today (October 31, 2007), company mangers who feel inadequately skilled for the high position they hold will choose employees who are themselves inadequately competent.

Though the study was conducted with college students who were placed in particular leadership positions, the researchers conclude that their results provide evidence that managers in companies behave in the same ways as the student subjects in the study. The researchers further conclude that the results of their study corroborate earlier studies that show that individuals who feel the need to justify their positions of authority or responsibility tend to collect less qualified and less competent individuals to work with.

One speculation is that this tendency to work with others who are equally inadequately skilled is an effort to prevent competition from subordinates for the superior position. Another speculation as to why this tendency of inadequate managers to attach to equally incompetent workers is that the manager may be trying to justify their position of authority and responsibility.

The study employed 73 college students from the University of Granada's Faculties of Psychology and Sciences of Education and the University School of Social Work. As it happens, 85.7 percent of these participants were college women between 18 and 25 years old. The study was conducted by Rosa Rodriguez Bailon and Miguel Moya Morales who are both professors of Social Psychology and Methodology in the Behaviour Sciences Department of Granada University, along with Vincent Yzerbyt from the University of Lovaina in Belgium.

The students in the study were offered participation in a situation in which they had the opportunity to exercise power. They were informed that they would be representatives at a student conference. They were also informed that they would select one assistant for the conference who would be under their supervision and work directly for them.

The participants were arbitrarily divide into two equal groups. One group was told that they were qualified for the role of power assigned to a student representative, hence were legitimate representatives. The other half were told that they did not deserve the power accorded with appointment as a student representative and thus were illegitimate representatives.

All participants were allowed to choose an assistant and all had a choice between someone who was very competent and very sociable or someone who was noticeably less competent and less sociable. The assistant candidates were assigned for selection by the researchers in such a way that the candidates' differences in levels of competence and sociability would be readily noticed.

When each of the 73 participants made their assistant selections from the two choices offered them--competent and sociable versus incompetent and unsociable--the participants making the selection clearly distinguished between the two candidates, clearly noticing the privileged position of the one over the other.

The researchers found that the legitimate representatives preferred to choose the competent and sociable assistant over the other. While, conversely, the illegitimate representatives preferred to choose the less competent and less sociable assistant over the privileged one. Additionally, the illegitimate representatives asked more questions about the privileged candidate than about the less competent candidate, so their choices were well informed and not made without full understanding of the skills and assets of the rejected candidate.

The researchers conclude that people who do not feel qualified for their positions of power surround themselves with employees who are perceived to be at the same low level of competence and sociability. The researchers define power as "the influence that a person has over other people and over themselves."

Bailon, Morales and Yzerbyt state that the implications of the evidence of this study show that in companies, the "legitimate" and the "illegitimate" bosses assess the employees whom they manage in a similar way and have similar opinions about the employee's abilities and personal characteristics, just as the was the case in the student study. The researchers further conclude that "people who have power do not always exercise it properly."

"Executives who think they do not deserve their position tend to work among incompetent employees to justify themselves," University of Granada, Spain.