Is Personal Power a Good Thing?

Jan. 7, 2009— -- In less than two weeks President-elect Barack Obama will get a lot more of something he already has -- plenty of personal power.

Scholars who have studied how power is acquired, used and sometimes lost are watching that date with some trepidation and some excitement. Without the power to excite the electorate, he could not have won the election. But now he is about to assume the mantle of the U.S. presidency, making him arguably the most powerful man in the world.

Will his personal power that we have seen him exercise so skillfully during the last two years serve him well in his wider role? After all, power corrupts, right? Isn't that much power likely to make him arrogant, following his own course regardless of the advice he's surely going to get from a cabinet of rivals?

Very unlikely, according to Adam Galinsky, a professor of ethics in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

Galinsky is the lead author of a recent study showing that power frees a person to listen to others without abandoning a personal vision. Power also increases creativity and makes it easier to ignore bad advice, even if it comes from a "very important person," Galinsky said in a telephone interview. And it doesn't necessarily corrupt.

Obama's personal sense of power, Galinsky said, "is going to allow him to have that secure confidence where he's not going to be too rigid, or too easily swayed, by the opinions of others. He might be able to chart a course that can somehow navigate those two extremes that can take down presidents."

But where did he get that sense of power? Several sources.

"Obama has a level of charisma, a really hard thing to define. Charisma is that ethereal feeling you get in the presence of another person who inspires you," Galinsky said. "He clearly has that. He has immense capacity for self-reflection [as shown in his book about his father] and having gone through that period of self-reflection, which was clearly a very difficult part of his life, emerged with a kind of serene self-confidence."