14 DAY TRIAL // Your boss may be a dickhead, but he/she thinks he/she is a genius and the others are lunkheads.
His coarse style is a sign of humor, even if the employees disagree...or he/she can be a sociopath who really believes in his/her great social communication skills ...
But a new study made by Dr. Daniel Ames, a professor at Columbia Business School, and Dr. Francis Flynn, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business revealed that being under- or overassertive may be the most common weakness among aspiring leaders and that a middle level of assertiveness would characterize the best leader.
In the research, the investigators asked workers for their opinion on their colleagues' leadership strengths and weaknesses.
The most appreciated traits of a leader were intelligence, self-discipline, and charisma. Assertiveness represented by far the most frequently-mentioned problem, more than charisma, intelligence, and self-discipline combined.
Intelligence, self-discipline, and charisma are a problem when they lack, but assertiveness was found "wrong" in both directions.
More than half of the adjectives referring to the weak behavior of the leader indicated assertiveness, twice as common as the runners-up such as "focused," "able," and "sure." "Assertiveness dominated reports of leadership weaknesses, though it wasn't nearly as common in colleagues' comments about strengths. When leaders get assertiveness wrong, it's glaring and obvious, but when they get it right, it seems to disappear," said Ames.
"We say it's like salt in a sauce: when there's too much or too little, it's hard to notice anything else, but when it's just right, you notice the other flavors. No one compliments a sauce for being perfectly salted, and it's just as unusual for a leader's perfect touch with assertiveness to attract much notice."
The researchers looked for an answer for what drives the effect at both extremes. "Aspiring leaders who are low in assertiveness can't stand up for their interests, and they suffer by being ineffective at achieving goals and delivering results. On the other hand, people high in assertiveness are often insufferable. So, even though they may get their way, they're chocking off relationships with the people around them. As time goes by, the social costs add up and start to undermine the results," Ames notes. "Most effective leaders push hard enough to get their way but not so hard that they can't get along."
The investigators say that leaders that are moderately assertive may be better able to tune their behavior according to the situation. Leaders stuck at the extremes of assertiveness could possess a narrower span of behavior, but most of the time they are surprised when they learn that they're seen by others as off base, because they usually are arrogant or megalomaniac. "We often find that students and executives are unaware of how other people see their behavior. One reason is because people typically don't get candid feedback on things like assertiveness," said Ames. "Who wants to tell the overbearing boss that he or she is a jerk?"