Whether an extravert or introvert would do better at leading depends on the situation. When the rank-and-file of an organization are expected primarily to engage in repetitive motor actions, passively operating a tool or machine in the same manner for hours, extraverted managers generally get better performance out of them than do introverted managers. However, when it comes to leading a team in which each member is expected to take initiative and generate new ideas, introverted managers frequently educe more productivity from the team than do the extraverted managers. Adam Grant of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School, and David Hoffmann of the University of North Carolina conducted a series of experiments demonstrating as much. They organized various groups of people. An extravert led each control group and an introvert led each experimental group. Whether extravert or introvert, the leader was to lead his or her team in folding as many shirts in an allotted period of time as possible. The experimenters provided every group leader instructions on how the shirts were to be folded and, unbeknownst to the group leaders, the instructions the experimenters provided were very deliberately inefficient; anyone who followed these instructions would be folding shirts much more slowly than he would if following a more ergonomic method. Almost unbeknownst to every team leader, each team had a member who was actually an actor -- a plant working on behalf of the experimenters. The actor in every team would approach the team leader and suggest a much more efficient method of folding the shirts. Whether this suggestion would be implemented and applied would be left to the discretion of the team leader. The introvert leaders, generally being more open to listening to others, were 20 percent likelier than the extraverted leaders to implement the suggestion. As a consequence, the introvert-led teams outperformed the extravert-led teams by 24 percent. Later, the experimenters repeated the experiment but did not plant any actors in any teams making the suggestion --- every team was expected to follow the inefficient method the experimenters provided. In that later version of the experiment, the extravert-led teams outperformed the introvert-led teams by 22 percent. Extraverted leaders are usually more effective enforcers of autocratically imposed rules than are introverted leaders, but introverted leaders are more open to practical suggestions on how procedures can be improved. Here is the PDF of the study: francescagino/pdfs/grantginohofmann_amj2011.pdf
Posted on: Wed, 16 Apr 2014 02:29:56 +0000
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