I’m currently working my way through Alex Haslam’s book Psychology in Organizations – The Social Identity Approach. One of the more intriguing pieces of research it presents is on the impact of systematic and random leader selection on group performance.
A study conducted by Haslam and others(*) came to the conclusion that if a group has a specific goal to achieve and you want to maintain or strengthen that group, you’re better off choosing your leader at random – provided that the group already has a salient social identity and actually wishes to achieve the goal set.
Paradoxically however, leaders and their followers tend to perceive that randomly selecting a leader is somehow unsatisfactory, ineffective and illegitimate, even when there is clear evidence that picking a leader at random results in demonstrably better outcomes.
Perhaps on the basis of this evidence, political parties should abandon internal selections and elections, and choose people randomly from within their ranks to lead. It would certainly be an interesting hypothesis to test when the time eventually comes for Nick Clegg to relinquish the leadership of the Lib Dems. While I appreciate that may be a step too far for many in the party (and myself too, if I’m being absolutely honest), perhaps there is a lower-stakes experiment we could conduct to see if this genuinely could be the way forward.
For example, it would certainly be fun to see if Manchester United would fare even better if the club randomly picked one of its fans to take on the job so recently vacated by Sir Alex.
(*) Haslam, S.A., McGarty, C., Brown, P.M., Eggins, R.A., Morrison, B.E., & Reynolds, K.J. (1998) ‘Inspecting the emperor’s clothes: evidence that randomly selected leaders can enhance group performance’, Group Dynamics: Theory, Research and Practice, 2, 168-84.