The Mechanism Of Advisor’s Power On Advice-taking

Since the Judge-Advisor System (JAS) was proposed by Sniezek in1995, it hasattracted more and more research attention in the field of decision research. Advice-takingis a situation when facing a decision, people often rely on other’s advice. There are fourmain sources influencing a judge’s advice-taking: the characters of advisor and judge,advice, decision situation and something brought by advice. Among all the researchesabout the influence of advisor’s power on advice-taking, power’s quantity attracts muchattention.Based on the cognitive dissonance theory, the study was conducted to explore therelationship between advisor’s power, which was classified as either prosocial power orantisocial power, and advice-taking in the paradigm of JAS under the help of socialexchange theory and protection motivation theory. Subsequently, inspired by cognitivedissonance theory, the study explored the influence of advice-taking on cognitivedissonance and satisfaction deeply. There were two relatively independent but relevantstudies. The first one (N=289) was conducted with the means of situation priming whichwas used for grouping the students in the laboratory. Following that one, the second one(N=356) tested the ecological validity of this research in some companies. It recomposedall the experimental procedures into questionnaire which measured the subjects’supervisor’s power in order to group them. The results prove that people controlled byprosocial power adopted advice on account of the trust on advisor, in the contrast, the oneswho was under antisocial power were just for fear from threat. This difference furtherleaded to the difference in cognitive dissonance and satisfaction. In other words, the firstones would not have imbalance between attitudes and behaviors and they would be moresatisfied, while the latter ones would have cognitive dissonance and dissatisfaction.If advisor did not know the final decision, those under prosocial power would notchange their cognitive dissonance significantly, but those under antisocial power wouldlower cognitive dissonance to the level of those under prosocial power. In the aspect ofsatisfaction changes, study one and study two drew different conclusions. In detail,subjects from the prosocial power group did not change their satisfaction significantly in study one, but satisfaction reduced significantly in study two. Except that, in study one,subjects under antisocial power reduced their satisfaction significantly, but satisfactionstayed steadily in study two. The study discussed the possible reasons: subjects’differences,needs of individuals and the revenge for threat. Implications, limitations and futuredirections of the study were discussed as well.