Hierarchical power: what authority does not guarantee
Authority enables people to settle a decision, but it can also change how they assess its consequences. The management question is specific: how can we check that a decision made from a position of power incorporates the constraints of those who must implement it?
What the literature establishes
Cameron Anderson and Adam D. Galinsky (2006, European Journal of Social Psychology) show, across a series of studies, that a heightened sense of power can encourage more optimistic risk perceptions and greater risk-taking. Their findings support the role of these optimistic perceptions in the relationship between power and risky choice. They do not imply that every decision made by a senior manager is excessively risky.
The perspective that authority can overlook
Adam D. Galinsky, Joe C. Magee, M. Ena Inesi and Deborah H. Gruenfeld (2006, Psychological Science) show that power can reduce spontaneous consideration of other people's perspectives. In their experimental tasks, participants placed in a position of power notably had greater difficulty accounting for the fact that someone else did not have the same information. For management, this mechanism suggests a difficulty distinct from a lack of expertise: knowing how to act does not guarantee an understanding of what others can see or do.
The hasty conclusion
One might conclude that decisions should be taken away from those who hold authority. Yet these studies do not compare the overall performance of organisations with different degrees of hierarchy. Greater risk-taking can be useful; the question is whether it rests on explicit assumptions and a sufficiently accurate understanding of implementation constraints. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence does not allow us to transfer directly
A position of power induced in an experiment does not reproduce professional experience, regulatory obligations or a team's lasting relationships. These articles therefore cannot quantify the effect of authority on decision quality in a Lausanne business. In practice, simply asking whether everyone agrees does not establish that the decision-maker has understood each person's constraints either.
A practical check in Lausanne
As part of SHR's « Prise de décision » programme, an exercise could be offered to a medtech team, a higher education institution, an international sports organisation in Lausanne or a scale-up in the Lake Geneva region: before making a decision, the decision-maker records the constraints they attribute to those responsible for implementation. Those people annotate the record separately, after which the decision-maker documents any corrected assumptions and their possible effect on the choice. Over a trial period defined in advance, measure the proportion of decisions for which this comparison led to the correction of at least one implementation assumption, retaining both dated versions as evidence. This indicator does not prove that the final decision is better; it checks that the decision-maker's understanding was genuinely tested. To go further: explore the Decision-making training in Lausanne, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Decision-making in Lausanne
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