The Influence Of Power On Advice-Seeking:The Mediation Effect Of Confidence And Moderation Effect Of Humility

In today’s organizational life, only depending on the leader’s personal decision-making can not adapt to the fast development pace of the internal and external environment. Advice from others plays an important role in the decision-making process.The study on advice mostly pays attention to the topic of advice taking and giving; few scholars explore the decision to seek advice. Power as a key character of leader impacts the decision-making.In this paper, from the perspective of individual power differences, we discussed the relationship between the sense of power and advice seeking and its mechanism. In study 1,based on the data(N=102)collected from social workers by a method of questionnaire survey, we investigated the relationship between power and advice seeking. The result indicated power was negatively related to advice seeking. In study 2, 119 students participated in our experiment. In the experiment, participates first made an estimation on the number of the coins in the bottle. And then, they need to finish the power primed task and evaluate their confidence on the previously estimation task. At last, they were asked the possibility to ask for advice if the advice was available before the following second round of estimation. The result verified our hypothesis again: power was negatively related to advice seeking and confidence mediated the relationship even after controlled the accuracy of the estimation. In study 3, we recruited 179 students in the experiment. First,we primed their sense of power through the role-playing game. After that, they need to evaluate their confidence and advice seeking behavior in this scenario. At last, we used the relational humility scale to measure their level of humility. The result indicated humility moderated the relationship between power and confidence; and also moderated the mediation effect.The conclusions indicated evaluated power would negatively effect advice seeking.That is because power would cause confidence to be artificially inflated, which would only serve to exacerbate overconfidence and reduce advice seeking. The relationship betweenpower and advice seeking was mediated by confidence, and the mediation effect was moderated by humility. That indicated humility could resist overconfidence caused by power. In the end of the paper, theoretical and practical implications were discussed.