Replication of Kipnis' "Does power corrupt?"

Abstract

In 1972, David Kipnis conducted an experimental study where participants (28 MBA students) acted as supervisors for a simulated task. Half of the participants were told they had a number of institutional powers to employ when motivating their subordinate; the others were not given these instructions. What was found was that not only did almost all of those participants told they could use these powers use them, their opinion of their own performance and that of their subordinates was greatly affected by this priming. The purpose of this pilot study was to explore whether the results of Kipnis’ study would apply today, and whether his choice of participants (MBA students) could have impacted his results. In contrast to Kipnis’ research, in this study, across 28 leadership attempts, participants were very unlikely to use power under any condition (only one-in-twelve without power and one-in-sixteen with power). If these findings are supported in a larger sample they suggest that norms around managing have changed and the blatant use of power is less acceptable. While there were no easily apparent differences between the groups (MBA or IDS) or conditions (power or no-power) in their opinion of their own performance or that of their subordinates, we did observe other interesting results: 1) IDS students were considerably more likely to question the study and the scales than the MBA participants, and 2) considerable incentives may be necessary in our time-crunched society to get participants for this type of labour intensive research.