Leadership and Cultural Change: Implications for Behavior Analysis.
Leaders keep leading when their own behavior pays off too, not just when they help others.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team built a lab game with two adult volunteers. One person became the “leader.”
The leader pressed a button to give points to a “follower.” Points were money.
In one phase the leader also got points for every press. In the other phase the leader got nothing.
The researchers flipped these conditions back and forth to see if leader pressing lived or died.
What they found
Leader pressing stayed strong when the leader also earned points.
When only the follower got points, leader pressing quickly stopped.
The pattern reversed each time the condition changed.
Mutual reinforcement keeps leaders in the game.
How this fits with other research
Hammond (1980) first showed that rats slow their lever press when the contingency weakens. van Timmeren et al. (2016) now prove the same rule works for human leadership.
Weiner (1977) found that people quit “altruistic” button presses faster than self-pay presses. The new study echoes this: leaders work for their own pay, not just the group’s.
Kuroda et al. (2018) showed that the response-reinforcer correlation itself drives behavior. The leadership study uses the same logic in a social two-person setup.
Why it matters
Your supervisees, parents, or co-leaders will stay engaged only if their actions produce reinforcers for them. Build mutual contingencies: let the team leader also gain something—praise, points, or perks—while they support the client. Check your protocols for “one-way” reinforcement that may quietly extinguish the very people you need most.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Abstract This paper describes and experimentally demonstrates the main tenets of an operant theory of leadership. Leadership is characterized in the current paper as involving problem solving operant behavior (Cerutti, 1989; Skinner, 1969) in a social context (Skinner, 1953). The theory was assessed under two experimental analogs modeled from generic formal organizational bureaucratic leader-follower role relations. Under a minimal leadership contingency (MLC) leaders and followers in N = 4 dyads interacted via button pressing and trigger pulling responses, respectively, and they received feedback on counters located on response panels in their separate rooms. Under the MLC every leader button press added a point worth money to one of the follower's counters but the leader received no points worth money based on follower responses. A leadership contingency (LC) was identical to the MLC except that for every 19th follower trigger pull the leader received a point worth money. As anticipated, high rates of leader-follower interaction evolved in all dyads under the LC and appreciably lower rates occurred under the MLC as leader button pressing extinguished under the MLC with repeated exposures to the two contingencies presented in ABABAB fashion. Results were discussed in terms of the theory and data as they may be related to assessment and maintenance of leader-follower interactions and performance in OBM lab and field experiments. Key Words: Operant theorysuperior-subordinate dyadsoperant behaviorleadershipeffective leadershipmutual reinforcementfollower performanceleadership contingencies
The Behavior analyst, 2016 · doi:10.1300/J075v25n04_03