Motivation and emotion/Book/2024/Cultural variations in power motivation

Cultural variations in power motivation:
How does culture influence power motivation and its expression?

Multimedia presentation (3 min)

Overview

Scenario: A crowd enraptured Figure 1. Influencing people has been a part of human behaviour for millenia. Imagine you are Mark Antony giving a speech at the funeral of Julius Caesar (see Figure 1). You can sway the crowd - bring them to tears and make them roar for vengeance on the killers of their ruler! How does imagining yourself in that position make you feel? Are you proud; do you feel valuable? How might your family feel? Is speaking fluently and being able to rally a crowd something that you, or those you love, like a little too much? Power is intoxicating for many people and some cultures value status, influence, and hierarchy more than others. How much power and wealth you would take if you could? Would you take a little - maybe a lot? Does it matter how others think of you when you exert influence? Everybody answers these question differently, with different reasoning, but why? Ultimately, it is a matter of what you were taught to value, and how fulfilling your values makes you feel. Some people are taught from a young age that influence is of the utmost value, regardless of what others think. Other people are shaped to be reluctant leaders, prioritising their relationships with others over the amount of power they exert. These taught ideas affect all people on a fundamental and unconscious level, driving them to pursue certain goals, and making them feel good when they achieve them.

Power motivation is a need to influence other people and the world at large, which is taught to people from a young age. It is part of someone's personality across their entire lifespan, manifesting as a fundamental emotional drive; people with a high power motive feel deep personal satisfaction when they can mould their environment according to their own vision.

Culture affects the expression and acquisition of power through norms, beliefs, and institutions. Ultimately, power itself can be seen as a part of culture and subsumed within it, and all powerful individuals lean on social and cultural ideas to legitimise and support their authority. An individual with a high power motive needs to be keenly aware of the role culture plays in shaping interpersonal interaction and, therefore, leadership to be influential. Depending on the culture in question, people with a high power motive are sometimes outright rejected. However, an individual can increase their influence within these environments by modifying their own behaviour to reflect the accepted behaviours and norms related to power. People from different cultural backgrounds are taught power motivation differently, treat power differently, and express power differently; power-motivated people need to be aware of those variables to increase their own influence.

Focus questions: What is power motivation? What is the relationship between power and culture? How does the relationship between power and culture affect power motivated people?

What is power motivation?

Figure 2. Not all people motivated to influence others do it for the wrong reasons. A real desire for influence and power was needed in the American civil rights movement.

Power motivation, also known as need for power, is "a desire to influence, control, or impress others", and "receive acclaim" for that behaviour (Fodor, 2010). Power motivation is learned across life, particularly in childhood, and is a stable and enduring part of personality (Reeve, 2018, p.154; McClelland et al, 1989). All individuals exist on a spectrum somewhere between high and low power motivation, which is reflected within the brain (Schultheiss et al., 2008). However, power motivation is distinct from genuine influence (Luqman et al., 2022); individuals who have a strong psychological desire for power are more likely to try influencing others, but no more successfully than anyone else (van Schie, 2020). Power motive is a taught thing, and if an individual is told from a young age that influence over others is good, they will pursue it regardless of their leadership skills. However, if influence is gained and exerted, an individual with a high power motive will feel a deep satisfaction, as years of socialisation come to fruition.

High power motivation creates a tendency to try and influence the behaviour of others, particularly those that seem susceptible to influence. This tendency begins in childhood (Spengler et al., 2020) and children with high power motives appear to target children who seem easy to manipulate (Spengler et al., 2020) The stability of the power motive means this targeting of the vulnerable continues into adulthood (Janson et al., 2022). These behavioural patterns have the potential to create incredibly competitive and unpleasant environments where people pursue their own goals at the expense of others (Friedrichs et al., 2023; Schattke & Marion-Jetten, 2022). Children who bully others and executives who steamroll and manipulate their employees are all examples of high power motivations eliciting nasty and antisocial behaviour. However, a desire to influence others does not always lead to cruelty.

Some people use their desire to influence and change the world for good, much like Martin Luther King Jr. did as part of the American civil rights movement (see Figure 2). Martin Luther King Jr. had a talent for swaying crowds and had a deep-seated abhorrence of racial segregation. This ultimately led him to becoming a Reverend and a Minister of the Baptist Church. He drew on his core Christian values, alongside the common theology of the time, to persuade individuals to oppose racial segregation through non-violent means (Carson and Lewis, 2024). His appeal to a commonly held belief system and his incredible drive to change the world according to his vision led to immense success, and he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Reverend King Jr. was a man who influenced the world to bend it to his vision, but few in 2024 would view his work as immoral. As such, he serves to illustrate the good that can come from a strong psychological power motive.

Quiz (answer true or false to the below statements):

1 People with a high power motive are not necessarily immoral.

	True
	False

2 Power motivation is something all people have lots of, because we all want to make our mark on the world.

	True
	False

What is the relationship between power and culture?

Power is deeply intertwined with and dependent on culture. Reverend King Jr. relied on the commonly held beliefs of his time and his social position to exert influence over others; beliefs and social positions can be seen as elements of culture, a concept that encompasses the river of norms, behaviours, customs, and attitudes that people share within groups. Culture distinguishes groups of people from one another and is a complex topic. Manifestations of culture, such as behavioural norms or belief systems, are discussed regarding their relationship with power. These must be referred to, as expressions of power is largely subordinate to the cultural environment it is obtained and exercised within.

Power motivated people seek rewards and symbols of power (Reeves, 2018; Fodor, 2010), but these are not consistent between cultures, illustrating elemental cultural differences in the power motive. Power itself is thought of differently between cultures (Torelli et al., 2020), producing different ideas of what symbolises or rewards it. For example, Chinese and American individuals have their power motives aroused by different socially significant stimuli (Ng et al., 2011), indicating that their cultural backgrounds influence what motivates them to influence their environment. Power motive being aroused by different stimuli then leads to different goals and behaviours relevant to the desired symbols or rewards. Though the research in this area is not definitive, it strongly suggests that the power motive is a universal human phenomena, but is taught and incentivised differently between cultures (Hofer and Chasiotis, 2022), leading to different behavioural manifestations of the power motive in people from different cultural backgrounds.

Not only is power thought of differently between cultures, but it is also utilised differently. Cultural norms shape power through social interaction and regulation. For example, Wang and colleagues (2022) found that individuals with high power motives tended to be more altruistic when watched. Though these results were obtained in a laboratory setting, evidence indicates that the principle of scrutiny making leaders more prosocial tends to hold true (see Samuels et al., 2021, for example). Scrutiny as a cultural norm hinders leaders from expressing power through deception, as people tend to investigate their behaviour. This is only an example of a single norm, bit it illustrates how expressions of power become subordinated to culture through social regulation. Power structures seem innate to the human species, but social regulation of power and its use through shared norms and beliefs appears equally natural (van Kleef and Cheng, 2020). Not only is the nature of power taught to people, but how power should be expressed is taught, and those shared norms are used to regulate the use of power.

Case study: power motives in the workplace. Friederichs et al. (2023) recruited 383 English speaking executives to understand the relationship between power motivation and bosses being mean or nice. They found that the relationship between power motivation and behaviour towards staff was mostly moderated by how bosses managed their own emotions. Internal emotional regulation, such as reflection and meditation, led to nice bosses, but external emotional regulation, such as yelling, led to mean bosses. Though power motivation had some role, other personal characteristics were significant determinants of a boss' behaviour. These ideas are built on by the work of Schattke and Marion-Jetten (2024), who found that leaders being nice or mean could be predicted by particular personality traits. What is worth considering, is that both emotional regulation strategies (Ramzan and Amjad, 2017) and the relevant personality traits (Luo et al., 2023; Jonason et al., 2020) are strongly associated with cultural variables; someone being a nice or mean boss seems to have a lot more to do with their personal background than their desire for power.

Power is reliant on cultural institutions, making the goals of power motivated individuals dependent on cultural variables. Culture is the product of interaction between people on a massive scale, and it is self-perpetuating as a standard for social interaction (Erez and Gati, 2004). Every powerful person in human history depends on these standards of interaction a culture embodies and institutionalises. Anytime a leader sets out to modify or destroy a cultural standard, typically an institution of some kind, they endeavour to replace it with another (Kraus and Torrez, 2020). Separating power from the standards of social conduct provided by culture is impossible. Leaders rely on cultural norms, beliefs, and institutions to mobilise people and their power is largely subsumed by the cultural framework they are dependent on. A powerful person needs culture to provide a framework for their influence; this positions power as subsumed within culture. Power-motivated people need to be keenly aware of culture to succeed in influencing others.

Quiz (answer true or false to the below statements):

1 Leaders can ignore cultural norms or standards because all people communicate and organise themselves the same ways.

	True
	False

2 All cultures relate to power the same way, because we are all humans at the end of the day.

	True
	False

How does the relationship between power and culture affect power motivated people?

The deferent relationship power has with culture can have significant consequences for the way an individual with a high power motive is treated by people from different backgrounds. People in different cultural groups lean on different understandings of power and its acceptable use, so an individual with a high power motive will be rejected if they do not conform to those understandings. For example, in cultures with high power distance: the degree to which power is segregated and withheld between groups; individuals with high power motives tend to be less likeable or outgoing. However, in cultures with low power distance, there is no difference in outgoingness or likability between people with high or low power motives (van Emmerik et al., 2010). This can be simply explained by thinking about hierarchy: a culture with strong norms of hierarchy will reject an individual looking to change their social status or influence things beyond their station, and prefer individuals who accept the status quo (van Emmerik et al., 2010). On the other hand, a culture that lacks strong norms of hierarchy generally doesn't care about the goals or motives a person has regarding their personal influence. Table 1 breaks this down visually, illustrating how cultural power distance impacts the way people with a high power motive are treated, and how cultural norms can play out on a small interpersonal scale. Individuals with high power motives are responded to by other people following the cultural river those people swim within, sometimes negatively.

Table 1. A simplification of the work of van Emmerik et al. (2010) in identifying how the personal-level variable of power motive interacts with the culture-level variable of power distance.

	High cultural power distance	Low cultural power distance
High personal power motive	Rejected by others.	No effect.
Low personal power motive	Accepted by others.	No effect.

Individuals with high power motives are capable of increasing their influence by adjusting their behaviour to reflect a cultures norms and beliefs about power A high power motive is often linked to a desire for status and wealth (Santos & Port, 2023), but also dominance (Wirth et al., 2006). If an individual is pursuing dominance, status, and wealth in a cultural environment that rejects that behaviour, they will likely be rejected by others. However, evidence suggests that increasing your social and cultural awareness can help circumvent this issue. Hanson and colleagues (2007) found that drill instructors in the military became more socially influential after they were given training on social awareness, allowing them to adjust their own behaviour to reflect particular cultural frameworks of interaction. For example, training an Australian and an Indonesian would probably be similar, but still different, and recognising those differences could help a drill instructor influence their pupils. Drill instructors who were capable of this kind of social awareness were able to exercise dominance over more trainees of different backgrounds. Recognising difference and communicating and interacting with people the way they want generally smooths any social interaction (Pinto et al., 2012), as it appeals to the cultural frameworks someone is familiar with. Scientific literature on this topic is sparse, but it does suggest that adjusting to a culture's frameworks for communication and influence can help to reduce the cultural barriers a power-motivated individual may face.

Power motivation is an internal and personal variable, and though it may partly inform how an individual relates to a culture, it does not make them an inflexible statue that is predestined for success or failure. All of the research discussed so far is about tendencies; for example, in high power distance cultures, people with high power motives tend to be rejected (van Emmerik et al., 2010). That does not mean, however, that all people with a high power motive are rejected. Ultimately, the personal agency of someone who desires power allows them to pursue influence in ways that do not fight the cultural river they swim within. Power is, in many ways, an expression of culture, as it fosters collective action in people as they unite under leadership. An individual who desires power has the ability to use strategies that harmonise with their cultural environment, or strategies that do not, and harmonic strategies tend to be more effective. Regardless of the cultural environment an individual finds themselves within, they are capable of intelligently adapting to it and pursuing their goals.

Quiz (answer true or false to the below statements):

1 An individual with a high power motive who joins a company in an entry-level position, where executives refuse to fraternise with normal staff, is likely to adjust well to the company culture.

	True
	False

2 Increasing your social awareness and interacting with people in ways that appeal to them increases your influence.

	True
	False

3 Power motivated individuals cannot adapt to their environment to achieve their goals.

	True
	False

Conclusion

Power motive is an enduring part of an individual's personality that drives them to influence the people and world around them. Culture informs the development of power motive and how it is expressed. An individual's cultural background fundamentally alters their relationship with power, and an individual with a high power motive will be treated differently in different cultural environments. For a power-motivated person to become more influential, they must be keenly aware of the way culture impacts interpersonal interactions. Culture elementally shapes power, the desire for it, and how it is related to, but individual people are capable of adapting to cultural variables to pursue their goals in different cultural frameworks.

See also

• Dark triad and power seeking motivation (Book chapter, 2025)
• Social dominance and power motivation (Book chapter, 2024)
• Power motivation and leadership (Book chapter, 2024)
• Motivation (Wikipedia)
• Power (social and political) (Wikipedia)

References

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External links

• The sociology of power and authority (Howard Community College)
• Culture and power: an interview with Stuart Hall (Radical Philosophy Archives)