Bias Towards Progress-Oriented Leaders: People Prefer Progress- over Maintenance-Oriented Leaders Even When a Maintenance Orientation is Required

We uncover a dissociation between people’s leadership preferences and perceived situational leadership demands. We distinguish between progress-, prevention-, and maintenance-oriented goals and argue that maintenance-oriented leadership offers important benefits in situations wherein the main concern is to sustain the group’s regular activity. Nonetheless, we show a dissociation between own and leader preferences, meaning that followers show a consistent preference for progress-oriented leaders, even when they themselves recognize situational calls for maintenance as the main concern of the group. We find this dissociation across four preregistered experiments (Ntotal = 2,110): In Experiment 1, we find that people prefer progress- over maintenance-oriented political leaders in a mock election scenario, not only when progress-oriented policies are required but also when maintenance-oriented policies are explicitly required. In Experiment 2, participants preferred maintenance-oriented group leaders when maintenance-oriented economic choices yielded greater monetary gains in an incentivized group game. Finally, in Experiments 3a and 3b, participants preferred progress-oriented leaders when their own personal preferences revealed a preference for maintenance-oriented policies. Combined, our studies reveal that when selecting leaders, participants neglect situational demands and own personal preferences in a manner that reflects bias in favor of progress- over maintenance-oriented leaders.