Q&A: What makes an ‘accidental dictator’ in the workplace?

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The professional world has no shortage of micromanagers — or, as Penn State School of Labor and Employment Relations (LER) faculty members Craig L. Pearce and Hee Man Park like to call them, “accidental dictators.”

But leaders don’t have to fall into that trap, according to an article published in the journal Organizational Dynamics co-written by Pearce, Brova Family Endowed Professor of leadership and human resources, and Park, associate professor of human resource management and director of LER’s graduate program.

The journal’s readership is largely made up of business leaders and human resources professionals — just the sort of people Pearce and Park hope to strike a chord with.

“We’re simply trying to create actionable knowledge that people can read and put into practice that very same day,” said Pearce, whose new book, “Shared Leadership 2.0: Taking Stock and Looking Forward,” co-authored with fellow LER faculty member Natalia Lorinkova and Christina L. Wassenaar, will be published April 24 by Cambridge University Press.

Pearce and Park recently took some time to discuss their findings.

Q: How did the idea for the article come about? And what exactly is an “accidental dictator” in the context of the workplace?

Pearce: The opening case in the article is about a music industry executive who took a course I taught on shared leadership at the Drucker School of Management. This was a class with a lot of executives. She shared with me her frustration with her direct reports not wanting to make decisions on their own, and I said, “Thank you for sharing — I think you might be the problem.” That was the genesis that led to this article.

I’ve been teaching the concept of the “smart person leadership trap” for 20 years, and it really resonates with so many people. Basically, it means you get into a leadership role because you’re smart and you know what you’re doing, but you might, inadvertently, end up establishing a pattern where you become the person to whom people come to for all the answers, and it slowly sinks in that you’ve created a dependency that you don’t want. The way we make it palatable is that we frame it as, you’re smart, that’s how you got into this problem. And because you’re smart you can figure your way out of this problem. This makes it accessible for practicing managers.

Park: When you look at delegation literature, leaders don’t typically delegate important decisions; they delegate less important, smaller tasks to their subordinates. They tend to not necessarily trust all the individuals in their group. In general, there’s a kind of hesitancy in delegating important decisions. That’s all in line with the accidental dictatorship idea.

There’s a lot of empirical evidence that when people become more highly visible in an organization, they start to get more requests about their expertise and people start to rely on them more. That kind of dependency makes them even more of a dictator. Even if you don’t want to be that person, once you get into a position of power, you become very goal oriented. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but the downside of that is you tend to ignore other people’s advice. That approach might be successful for the first couple years for smart leaders, but eventually you reach capacity, and you can’t advance to the next level. For the most part, organizations try to promote leaders who are good at their own tasks, but leaders need to be good at interpersonal relationships and collaboration.

Q: What are some practical ways leaders can steer clear of the dictatorial trap?

Pearce: One of them is the concept of “circumscribed empowerment.” People say empowerment is great, and it is, so you empower people. And then they do something that makes you go, “Good grief, how on Earth could they have decided to have done something like that?”

The notion of circumscribed empowerment is about placing guardrails around where your subordinates’ empowerment is. Because sometimes when people hear, “I’m empowered,” they might think, “Now I can do whatever I want.” Well, that’s not what most leaders envision when they empower someone. Circumscribed empowerment is about being more purposeful about the boundary conditions that people have, where you draw a circle around where someone is empowered — and give some guidelines around that. As an individual being empowered, you should still bounce your ideas off the leader, if your ideas affect other people. Same goes for a group that’s empowered — if it starts to affect other groups, you should bounce that idea off the leader.

Q: Can you talk more about the concepts of “shared vision” and “long-term perspective” that you discuss in the article?

Pearce: One of the key findings we’ve identified about shared vision is that engaging people in the process of creating the shared vision is perhaps even more important than the shared vision itself. People often assume that just because you state something, then it’s suddenly shared. That’s just not true — it often needs to be repeated. And then what reinforces it more is engaging people in that process.

The idea of long-term perspective just changes the whole way you approach life — the biggest difference between people in the world is one’s view of time. When you start thinking about the long term, it doesn’t mean you’re giving up short-term goals, but it makes you ponder things in a deeper and more comprehensive manner. It makes you think about the short term more effectively; it’s a core piece of advice because it enables all the other things to occur. 

Park: When organizations have a short-term perspective, the easiest way to select leaders is to pick people who are most successful in their current roles. But are they promoting individuals to leadership roles based solely on technical expertise? Or — even if it takes some time — are they also considering whether someone demonstrates strong interpersonal skills and the ability to collaborate effectively? Because that’s what leaders need to do. Leaders aren’t meant to handle everything themselves — they need to delegate decision-making to team members who are highly capable in their own roles. The problem is, when organizations focus only on the short term, they often default to picking the “smartest” person in the room. That might work to an extent. But with a long-term vision, the emphasis shifts toward interpersonal capabilities — those who can manage both tasks and relationships. What we’re arguing is that this is the key to sustained organizational success. In the long run, it’s clear that a collaborative culture ultimately wins.

Q: What are some ways in which the School of Labor and Employment Relations is taking a proactive approach to this issue?

Pearce: In the fall of 2024, we launched our residential organizational leadership major, and we have a leadership minor. And we’re about to launch a leadership certificate, where we think we can provide tremendous value to Penn State students, whether they’re in engineering or in the sciences or finance, whatever. You pick the technical topic, we now have the on-ramp where, with our leadership certificate, leadership minor or leadership major, we can round out your thinking to the point where you’re not only an expert in your technical area, but now you’ve developed your skills for working with others.