Featured in the digest section of the The Psychologist (March 2015) was this rather interesting finding. Researchers (Eagleman, Pitt and Savjani) have found people consider individual and corporate actions in the same way. Forty participants were given written scenarios to consider while their brains were being scanned. Some of these scenarios were written by individuals, others by corporations, with the scenarios having a prosocial, neutral or antisocial bias to them. The researchers found that the there were no significant differences in brain activity when a participant was considering either an individual or corporate missive. It seems that we don't 'de-humanise' a message when it comes from the corporation.
However, when participants were asked to declare how they actually felt about each scenario the results were more surprising: 'Humans behaving prosocially were met with stronger approval than were corporations, and misbehaving corporations made participants angrier'. Corporations seem to be judged more harshly. We tend to view unethical behaviour as a strong predictor of the future performance of the organisation, but are more forgiving if the message is attributed to an individual.
The implications of this seem to suggest that we view corporations as 'behaving' in the same way as we view individual behaviour, but we are more harsh in our judgements. What then, is the role of the leader? Does he/she need to retain some humanity when communicating the corporate vision? What should the leader do in times of adversity? How much of ourselves do we need to include in our communications with our followers?
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