The Effect of the Belief in Equality on Democratic Leadership Intent1

DAVID B. GRAY^ Westminster College

DAVID S. MIZENER Youngstown State University

Does the belief in equality correlate significantly with democratic leadership inten- tions? The belief in equality is defined as a set of assumptions that human ability and potential are widely distributed rather than being concentrated in the most highly educated. A reliable and valid inventory was developed to measure the belief in equality (BE). Two separate samples were studied-one of college students ( N = 201) and the other composed of blue- and white-collar workers ( N = 192). High BE participants exhibited higher democratic leadership intentions than did low BE par- ticipants on 6 paper-and-pencil leadership tasks 0, < .0001). The equality construct was found to be relatively independent of authoritarianism.

The belief in equality (BE) is defined as a set of assumptions that human ability and potential are widely distributed, rather than being concentrated in the most highly educated. The purpose of this research was to establish more firmly the principle that BE, correlates modestly but significantly with partici- pative leadership patterns such as training subordinates in cooperative team practices, delegating authority to subordinates, including subordinates in deci- sion making, and having confidence in and high expectations for group mem- bers. Preliminary work on the construction and validation of a scale to measure the BE was reported by Gray, Connor, and Decatur (1994). That early study was limited to college subjects and only two case-study tasks. In the current research, the BE scale was expanded from 21 to 32 items, a work-force sample was added and compared to a college sample, and six well-developed case- study tasks were used instead of the original two tasks.

General expectation theory (Rosenthal, 1994; Snyder, 1992) provides a theoretical framework for the BE, but the actual mediating expectancy proc- esses between the BE and democratic behavioral tendencies are beyond the

'This research is the U.S. portion of identical cross-cultural studies being coordinated by the first author in Heidelberg, Warsaw, Moscow, and the U.S. The study was supported by the Senior Studies Program at Westminster College. We thank Manfred Amelang and Jay Hall for their constructive suggestions in preparing the manuscript.

*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to David B. Gray, Department of Psychology, Westminster College, New Wilmington, PA 161 72. e-mail: grayd@psych.west- minster.edu.

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Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 1996, 26, 7 , pp. 652-656. Copyright 0 1996 by V. H. Winston & Son, Inc. All rights reserved.

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scope of this report. Leaders with a high BE should be more likely to approach others with the expectation they will or can perform well, or with the expecta- tion that they can be trained or developed to do well if the work environment is conducive. Dweck’s work (Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Erdley & Dweck, 1993) on the belief in plastic intelligence supports this training or growth aspect of the BE.

Research on the impact of dispositional leadership dimensions tends to find modest belief-behavioral relationships of not much more than about .30 with about 9 or 10% of the variance explained (Vroom & Yetton, 1973). The reader should keep in mind that in this study the behavioral component consisted only of paper-and-pencil organizational decision problems. The magnitude of the belief-behavior correlation was projected to fall somewhere near the fairly pervasive .30 ceiling.

Method

The 201 college subjects were from an Introductory Psychology class at a northeastern liberal arts college and received extra credit. They were 67% male, and had an average age of 19.7 years. The data were collected from five subjects at a time in a laboratory setting.

The work-force sample of 192 participants responded via the mail and represented states from New York to Colorado. These participants were pre- dominantly professional, but 29 assembly-line workers were included. The average age was 36.7 years, and gender was nearly balanced. All data were collected in the 1992-1993 academic year.

All subjects completed an experimental booklet consisting of 47 attitudinal questions (the 32-item BE scale, and 15 selected items from the authoritarian F scale), six 1 -page organizational cases with dependent variable questions, and a few demographic questions. Reliability for an earlier version of the BE scale was .90 (Gray et al., 1994). The 15 items from the F scale (Form 40/45; Robinson & Shaver, 1973) were chosen to reflect the three enduring elements of authoritarianism according to the current literature-conventionalism, authoritarian aggression, and authoritarian submission (Altemeyer, 1988). Authoritarianism was measured to examine the independence of BE because the two constructs may appear to be two opposite poles of one variable.

The six organizational tasks posed decision situations which the work-force sample found to be very realistic. Each task had two dependent variable questions probing slightly different aspects of the participants’ responses to the problem, thus generating 12 dependent variable measures for the six tasks. The first task or decision situation (training) posed a choice between allocating leftover year-end funds for training employees in team skills versus choosing

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some office refurbishing. The second task (delegating) probed willingness to delegate from a list of tasks which the participants were told that they did not have time to accomplish by themselves. The third and fourth tasks (parking and machines) had to do with the status aspect of reserved parking spaces and a production issue, respectively, and the participants were asked whether they would make the decision alone or on a consensus basis (both were standardized tasks from Vroom & Jago, 1988). In the fifth and sixth tasks (marketing and designer), subjects rated their confidence in and expectations of two new hires.

Results

The means for the BE scale were 134.05 and 130.15, respectively, for the two samples, with standard deviations of about 12. These descriptive results indicate that these two U.S. samples were approximately 10 to 20 points higher (on a scale ranging from 30 to 160) than four European samples, but the standard deviations were nearly identical (Ageyev, Amelang, Czapinski, & Gray, 1995).

The BE scale was split at the median and high and low BE subjects were compared across all 12 dependent variable questions for the six organizational tasks. The detailed means for democratic leadership preferences for both samples are displayed in Figure 1. For the student sample, a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) of two BE levels by 12 dependent variable questions (identical subjects) resulted in a significant effect: F(1, 190) = 16.03, p < .0001. A stepwise regression using BE as the predictor and the average task score as the criterion indicated an R of .33 (p < .0001), which explained 11% of the task variance.

Identical types of analyses were completed for the work-force sample. The MANOVA results were, F(1, 152) = 36.57,~ < .0001, and R was .49 (p < .OOl) , which explained 24% of the task variance.

Principal components analyses (with varimax rotations) of the 32 BE items for both samples produced very similar results: The four factors which emerged were: (a) equal concern for all, (b) all have creativity potential, (c) all persons can grow, and (d) belief in general potential. The average raw-score intercorrelations of the four factors were .43 and .49, respectively, for the two samples, suggesting a fair amount of independence between the factors. However, the Cronbach’s alpha internal consistency indices of .90 and .89, respectively, for the two samples indicate that a unidimensional structural interpretation may be somewhat more appropriate. Items from the F scale clearly did not load on the four BE factors. Correlations between the 32 BE items and the 15 F items were .I3 for the student sample and .40 for the business sample.

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51 1

L

Training Delegating Parking Machines Marketing Designer

Training Delegating Parking Machines Marketing Designer

Decision situations =High equality Low equality

Figure 1. Mean differences on leadership task performances for high and low equality participants on 12 dependent variables for a college student sample and a work-force sample.

Discussion

Reliability for the current 32-item BE scale seems to have been well established with Cronbach’s alphas at or very close to .90. Likewise, construct validity was well demonstrated in both the college and work-force sample, with the effect being approximately double for the work-force participants (1 1 YO and 24% of task variance explained, respectively). Mischel’s well-known person- ality-behavioral ceiling was surpassed slightly for the first sample, and very generously passed in the second sample.

BE clearly made a difference in paper-and-pencil organizational tasks; high believers in equality put more resources into training, delegated more, included subordinates in decision making more, and had more confidence in and had higher expectations for new employees when compared with low believers in equality. Obviously, the results must be interpreted within the limits of the data which are correlational and only employ paper-and-pencil substitutes for actual democratic leadership behavior in the field.

Field tests of real leaders’ behaviors (autocratic or democratic, as determined

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by their co-workers) and their matching BE scale differences are needed and are currently under way by the authors. We are also currently manipulating the situational strength of the organizational tasks to better understand the relative predictive power of BE.

References

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