An excerpt from the book Homo
Imitans by Leandro Herrero:
Like many aspects of the behavioural and
social sciences, it contains a high dose of stereotyped thinking
that is not always substantiated. Take public role models, for
example. The question is not whether they are powerful, but
what their relative power is when compared with other
mechanisms of social influence...
Eating habits are a good example. We spend a
lot of time criticizing thin young girls on the catwalk.
With their quasianorexic looks, we believe they are perverse role
models for the younger generation, who will then aspire to
become (and stay) a size zero. But if their influence is so
powerful, why do we have an epidemic of obesity and not of anorexia? As I
have mentioned before, a close friend or a friend of a friend
has more power to influence your body weight than thousands of
pictures of skinny people in magazines. Close ties may be more
powerful than pictures on a screen.
If you navigate the waters of corporate life,
as I do as an organizational consultant, you will often hear
that the role modelling of the senior leadership team
dictates what goes on below them. Or that people in the organization
cannot behave in a particular (ethical, effective, open...) way
if the leaders at the top don’t behave that way. Both claims assume
that the leadership or management team at the top has
great powers. It is so entrenched in our management thinking
that just the idea of challenging this would raise a few
corporate eyebrows. It is difficult to disagree with the idea that
the top leadership must surely be behaving following the
standards that they wish to be used in the organization and that if
these standards are poor, it is likely that the organization is on
shaky ground to say the least.
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