Posted by
whoyg2967 on Thursday, November 12, 2009 9:16:48 PM
wholesale140Barry Staw, a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley, has offered an elegant remedy to
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this ubiquitous quagmire: Have one individual make the initial
investment decision, and have a different individual make the
subsequent reinvestment decision. This partitioning of decision makers
removes the initial individual's self-serving need to justify and
defend previous investments, slackening the motivation to reinvest in
failing courses of action.
Despite the simplicity of that
remedy, our research, which will appear in an upcoming issue of Journal
of Experimental Social Psychology, documents a systematic and
destructive barrier: When new decision makers share a psychological
connection with old decision makers, they tend to invest further in the
failing programs of
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their predecessors, even to their own financial detriment. We have
labeled this phenomenon "vicarious entrapment." The problem is that
insiders are all but certain to share some connections with the leaders
they replace. Escaping the clutches of past failure, we argue, depends
not just on a physical separation, but also on a psychological
separation of the two decision makers. In other words, insiders may be
precisely the wrong people to fill a failed leader's shoes.
Our
research looked at three separate organizational contexts: financial
investments, personnel decisions and auctions. In each study, we
constructed a situation in which a prior decision maker's choices had
clearly gone awry. Our participants, acting as new, second decision
makers, faced a choice between dedicating further resources to the
failing course of action and dedicating the
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resources elsewhere. Their choice, we repeatedly found, depended on
whether they shared a psychological connection with the prior decision
maker.