The Influential Mechanism Of Power On Advice Taking

Power is defined as a kind of control towards the resources of information and decisions.At present,the researchers pay attention to the sense of power to decision-making.While the previous studies rarely explored the effect of power on advice taking.Thus,this study explores whether different levels of individual power could have different influences on adoption of suggestions,further steps to the relationship among the dispositional power,situational power and suggestion taking,and explores the influencing factors of advice taking.Situated Focus Theory of Power points that the different levels of the sense of power will cause the change of processing fluency,but it is not clear whether the change of processing fluency caused by the sense of power could have any effects on the advice taking.Therefore,this study investigates the mediating effect of processing fluency.This study includes three experiments.Experiment 1 tested the influence of individuals’ situational power on their advice taking by initiating subjects’ situational power through role-playing,and asked the subjects to complete career decision task to obtain the weight of advice(WOA).The results show that WOA of the low situational power group is significantly higher than that of the high situational power group,which leads to the suggestion discount effect.The experiment 2 aimed to further explore the mediating effect of processing fluency,using the same way as the first experiment,but lastly tested the processing fluency.The results found that processing fluency was very positively correlated with situational power.While situational power and processing fluency were significantly negatively correlated with WOA.Processing fluency was a mediating variables.The third experiment aimed to explore the moderating effect of dispositional power under the influence of situational power on the adoption of suggestions.The third experiment divided the subjects into high or low dispositional power group according to the outcome of Personal Sense of Power Scale.And then the experimenter randomly initiated the subjects’ situational power to complete the career decision task and got WOA.The results found that both situational power and dispositional power had main significant effects on advice adoption,situational power and dispositional power had a significant interaction,situational power was a moderating variable.Three major conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)The degree of advice taking is related to the situational power of the decision maker.Compared with the low power,the individuals with high power are so more inclined to their own decisions that the suggestions have a discount effect,while the individuals with low power have a higher degree of advice taking.(2)Processing fluency plays the role of mediating variable in the relationship between situational power and advice taking.Specifically,high power subjects have higher processing fluency in the process of decision-making information processing,which resulted in the suggestion discount effect.And low power subjects have a lower processing fluency,and then show a higher degree of advice taking.(3)Dispositional power moderates the relationship between situational power and advice taking.In details,compared with low dispositional power individuals,high dispositional power individuals show stronger suggestion discounting effect under high situational power,while low dispositional power individuals have higher degree of suggestion taking under low situational power.