Research Hit: When Bad Leadership is Effective
Playing favourites can, sometimes, be beneficial, but only sometimes.
Now that title sounds like a contradiction? Isn’t bad leadership, well, bad?
Yes, it is indeed a contradiction. I think the question to answer is why bad leadership is sometimes effective - even though it shouldn’t be.
Yes, I’d like to know that!
And in this study, which I have pulled up from last year, I just didn’t get around to writing about it before, it focuses on a specific aspect of bad leadership, namely playing favourites.
Which is great if you’re the favourite but not so great if you’re not!
Precisely, and this was the question asked: how does this impact team performance? Haoying Xu of the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey conducted a piece of research with in total 1’100 employees in various Chinese businesses and across different sectors.
And the results were surprising.
So, playing favourites, which is a form of bad leadership is good? Surely not!
No, but it can be beneficial in some situations. Not only for those favourites, obviously, but for the rest of the team also.
Oh, really how and when?!
Well the analysis showed that in structured teams it was detrimental to team performance, causing frustration, and lack of coordination and collaboration. So far so good - as we might expect.
Yes, what I would have thought - so when was it good?
It was beneficial in unstructured or less well organised teams. In this situation it seems to be that having favourites creates a hierarchy, and structure, and this increases effectiveness and is also beneficial for those who are not favourites because there is at least more clarity - even if that clarity may not be fair!
So technically it is not bad leadership that is good but creating more hierarchical structure that is good?
Well, spotted. It is why research has consistently shown (and this is a key metric in my team training) that clarity is critical for high performing teams.
But it is important to understand under what conditions “bad” leadership can be beneficial. In this case we can see why it works and of course good leadership in the first place would make the need for an informal hierarchy redundant.
Reference
Haoying (Howie) Xu, Sandy J. Wayne, Linda C. Wang, Jingzhou Pan.
LMX differentiation as a double‐edged sword: A social hierarchy perspective for understanding the beneficial and detrimental effects of LMX differentiation on team performance.
Personnel Psychology, 2023
DOI: 10.1111/peps.12564