ABSTRACT
Leaders wield power in many different ways. From the heroism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the atrocities of Slobodan Milosevic-and the wide range of more mundane prosocial and antisocial behavior in between-many leaders’ actions share something in common. They reflect a disregard for norms and a reduced concern for certain kinds of social consequences in the name of pursuing personal goals and objectives. In research on leadership, the willingness to take controversial stands and defy social convention is, like many other leadership qualities, most often attributed to personality characteristics, or to the fit between a leader’s personality and the social context in which it is exhibited (for a review see Haslam, 2001). In contrast, we suggest that leaders’ responses to aspects of their own leadership status transform their behavior in ways that contribute to these phenomena. Our perspective suggests that leaders share a set of psychological processes that are not typically examined in leadership research. In this chapter, we offer some theory and data on the psychology of power that inform our understanding of how leaders think and how they behave.
