Bias Toward Progress-Oriented Leaders

People Prefer Progress- Over Maintenance-Oriented Leaders Even When a Maintenance Orientation Is Required

Ecker, Yael
Weitzel, Anne I.
Lammers, Joris

Department of Psychology, University of Cologne

Musawenkosi Donia Saurombe served as action editor.

All data and materials for the reported studies are openly available on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/cxk6u/?view_only=b015b17ae9044314b67926eac93311a7. This article was funded by Germany’s Excellence Strategy (Grant EXC 2126/1-390838866) awarded to Joris Lammers.

Yael Ecker played a lead role in investigation, methodology, and writing–original draft and an equal role in conceptualization and writing–review and editing. Anne I. Weitzel played a supporting role in conceptualization, investigation, and methodology and an equal role in writing–review and editing. Joris Lammers played a lead role in funding acquisition, a supporting role in investigation and methodology, and an equal role in conceptualization and writing–review and editing.

Yael Ecker, Department of Psychology, University of Cologne, Richard-Strauss-Straße 2, 50931 Cologne, Germany [email protected]

Received May 3, 2024

revised June 12, 2025

Accepted June 30, 2025

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General Publish Ahead of Print, September 1, 2025. | DOI: 10.1037/xge0001827

We uncover a dissociation between leadership preferences (for progress, protection, or maintenance-oriented leaders) and situational requirements (to make progress, protect, or maintain). Despite maintenance being crucial for sustaining groups’ ongoing activity, we find a bias favoring progress-oriented leaders across contexts. In six preregistered experiments (N_total = 3,324), participants consistently preferred progress-oriented leaders even when they recognized maintenance as the primary situational need. In Experiment 1, people preferred progress- over maintenance-oriented political leaders in a mock-election paradigm even when maintenance was explicitly the dominant concern. In Experiment 2, participants chose progress-oriented group leaders in an incentivized group task, despite maintenance investments yielding greater monetary rewards. Furthermore, participants preferred maintenance-oriented over progress-oriented agendas but showed no (Experiment 3a) or opposite preference (Experiment 3b) when evaluating leaders who advocated identical policies. Our final studies test two explanations regarding the underlying process: Experiment 4 tests the idea that progress-oriented leaders are expected to invest more effort than others. However, manipulating perceived leader effort did not affect the preference for progress-oriented leaders. Instead, Experiment 5 identifies a different mechanism: Participants assume that progress-oriented leaders have wider goal scopes that also include maintenance goals, whereas maintenance-oriented leaders’ goal scope is assumed to be limited to maintenance. Blocking this assumption by explicitly describing progress leaders as maintenance-neutral reversed the preference pattern. Together, these studies point to a systematic bias in leadership selection that persists regardless of situational demands or personal policy preferences, revealing how biased assumptions about progress-oriented leadership shape choices that undermine optimal collective decision making.