Power is not addictive
Power is like peanuts: once you’ve tasted it, you want more. At least that’s the popular belief. Joris Lammers, a social psychologist at Tilburg University, together with the University of Groningen studied power. It turns out that power is not as addictive as we think.
Lammers and the researchers working with him mailed a questionnaire to highly educated readers of Intermediair. Their desire for power was a topic of the survey. From the thousand responses that followed, the researchers drew some remarkable conclusions, which shed a very different light on our thinking about power addiction.
People in senior positions are not so hungry for power as it was previously thought. There is no difference in the desire for power between people with no management position, and people with management position, but not the very top ones. One could think that adding the top management positions into the comparison would show a significant difference. However, the power demand of people at the top is, according to Lammers and his colleagues, even lower.
This has to do with the fact that for many power is not the goal in itself . Most people strive for self-determination, freedom and independence. People with high positions have many responsibilities, but also the freedom to work at their own pace. When that freedom demand is satisfied, the desire for power becomes much weaker.
The study of Lammers and his colleagues suggests a strong relationship between the desire for power and the desire for self-determination. How strong the relationship really is, is still to be investigated.
