People in Authority shows more ability to deal with rejected responses
Researchers have found that the people in authority have more ability to recover from the rejection.
This research has been done by researchers from the University of California-Berkeley.
Researchers in this study worked on 445 men and women in the age range of 18-82. They conducted five experiments to check the responses of the people, who are in some power, to the different acts of rejection either in romantic relationships or in the workplace.
Researchers found that the people in power, whether in the home or at workplace, will find social bonding opportunities even if they are rejected by others.
“Powerful people appear to be better at dealing with the slings and arrows of social life — they’re more buffered from the negative feelings that rejection typically elicits,” Maya Kuehn, a doctoral student in psychology at UC Berkeley and lead author of the study, said in a statement.
In one experiment, participants from the high or low-level positions in a workplace, were either invited or not invited to an office happy hour gathering. Researchers found that the people in low-level positions didn’t find this good, but high-power ones didn’t gave bad response and started working on other social bonding activities such as a hiking club, to improve relations with their co-workers.
In another experiment, participants were asked to work either in a supervisory or a subordinate role. They gave feedback about the co-workers that could be perceived as a mild rejection. Researchers found that the people in the supervisory role acted with indifference to apparent rejected thoughts from the underlings while the participants in the subordinate role took those responses as offenses.
“When rejected instead of accepted, subordinates reported lower self-esteem and greater negative emotion, but supervisors did not show an adverse reaction to rejection,” Kuehn said.
Similarly, researchers found that the romantic partners also showed the same results i.e. dominant partners showed more ability to work on problem solving tasks.
