Becky Schaumberg, a doctoral candidate in organizational behavior who conducted the research with Francis Flynn, the Paul E. Holden Professor of Organizational Behavior. at Standford GSB, have come with a counterintuitive conclusion: “Guilt-prone people tend to carry a strong sense of responsibility to others, and that responsibility makes other people see them as leaders.”
Although “guilt” and “shame” may seem quite similar to most people — and both are indeed negative responses to knowing you did something wrong — psychologists recognize a crucial distinction between the two: Whereas someone who feels guilty feels bad about a specific mistake and wants to make amends, a person who’s ashamed of a mistake feels bad about himself or herself and shrinks away from the error. Everyone tends to respond to mistakes according to one or the other pattern, and by giving people a written test that asks them how they’d react to specific blunders — such as spilling wine on the cream-colored carpet at a co-worker’s housewarming — researchers peg participants as either guilt-prone or shame-prone. That distinction makes all the difference in who is seen as a leader, as the rest of this study revealed.
When we think of a typical leader, most of us picture a person who’s sociable and upbeat. But in the research guilt proneness predicted emerging leadership even more than did extraversion, a well-known marker of leadership. Schaumberg explains that the group didn’t necessarily recognize these emerging leaders as particularly guilt-prone. Rather, guilt proneness showed in actual behaviors: For example, in group discussions, guilt-prone members of the group seemed to the rest of the group to be making more of an effort than others to ensure everyone’s voice was being heard, to lead the discussion, and generally to take charge. Thus, a strong link emerged between a participant’s guilt-proneness as measured in the personality tests and the extent to which others saw the person as a leader.
If these results seem counterintuitive,
The key seems to be that although guilt feels unpleasant to the individual, it can be quite beneficial for the group, causing people to do what’s good for the group at personal cost — and sometimes even at the expense of other individuals. A dramatic example comes from another study, in which Schaumberg and Flynn found that guilt-prone managers were more likely to support layoffs to keep a company profitable than were those who are less guilt-prone. It’s not that guilt-prone managers don’t feel bad having to lay people off — it’s that guilt seems to create a greater sense of responsibility to the organization. If people feel guilty toward their organizations, they’ll behave in ways that make sure they live up to the organization’s expectations and these behaviors might not look like what we usually think of as guilt.
We know that all of us make mistakes and mess up, and it’s important to look at how we respond to those mistakes because that’s a clue to who we are.There are many ways of responding to mistakes or other problems, including blaming others and blaming yourself. But the most constructive response, and the one people seem to recognize as a sign of leadership, is to feel guilty enough to want to fix the problem. On the other hand. people who are prone to shame feel responsible too, but shame proneness — a tendency to judge yourself — leads to pull away from problems
A guilt-prone person tends to judge his actions rather than himself and is driven to solve problems. Unfortunately in these struggled times we are leaving, it seems that some of our theoretical leaders are more the shame prone type. And other don´t even know what guilt or shame mean.
