The Strength of Weak Leaders - An Experiment on Social Influence and Social Learning in Teams

Berno Büchel, Stefan Klößner, Martin Lochmüller and Heiko Rauhut

No 268729, ETA: Economic Theory and Applications from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM)

Abstract: We investigate how the selection process of a leader affects team performance with respect to social learning. We use a lab experiment in which an incentivized guessing task is repeated in a star network with the leader at the center. Leader selection is either based on competence, on self-confidence, or made at random. Teams with random leaders do not underperform compared to competent leaders, and they even outperform teams whose leader is selected based on self-confidence. The reason is that random leaders are better able to use the knowledge within the team. We can show that it is the declaration of the selection procedure which makes non-random leaders overly influential. We set up a horse race between several rational and naïve models of social learning to investigate the micro-level mechanisms. We find that overconfidence and conservatism contribute to the fact that overly influential leaders mislead their team.

Keywords: Research; Methods/; Statistical; Methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 77
Date: 2018-02-26
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-exp and nep-soc
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Related works:
Journal Article: The strength of weak leaders: an experiment on social influence and social learning in teams (2020)
Working Paper: The Strength of Weak Leaders - An Experiment on Social Influence and Social Learning in Teams (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:feemth:268729

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.268729

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