Distinguishing the Explicit Power Motives

Abstract. Power is an important motivator at work, particularly for leaders. However, power also relates to dark personality traits, which negatively affect employees and organizations. Therefore, we argue that a high explicit power motive is a double-edged sword depending on whether people desire power for dominance, prestige, or leadership. We explored these research questions in a cross-sectional ( N = 151 employees) and a prospective study ( N = 371 leaders). Both studies revealed that dominance is most strongly related to Machiavellianism and moderately to narcissism and psychopathy. Prestige related strongly to narcissism and weakly to Machiavellianism, while leadership only weakly related to narcissism. Dominance best predicted counterproductive work behavior (CWB), while leadership best-predicted organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). In addition, Study 2 showed that transformational and, to a lesser extent, transactional leadership styles mediated the relations between the three power motives with OCB and CWB, respectively. Thus, promoting transformational leadership might be a fruitful way of channeling leaders’ power motives into pro-social actions.