What Your Boss’s Helping Style Means for Your Growth
Featuring Hemant Kakkar
A study finds that dominant leaders solve problems for you, but prestige-oriented leaders teach you how to solve them.
October 08, 2025
Display Settings
Display mode
Text size
Listen to this article
Hemant Kakkar
Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour. His research draws on social psychology and evolutionary theories of status and influence to examine judgments and behaviours of individuals and groups within social hierarchies. He also investigates why individuals sometimes engage in deviant behaviour, both positive and negative.
Key Takeaways
- Dominant leaders provide ‘dependency help’, which keeps employees reliant on them.
- Prestige-oriented leaders help employees become self-reliant by providing ‘autonomy help.’
- Leaders’ zero-sum mindset (where someone must lose for them to win) pushes them towards ‘dependency help.’ Threats on their status make dominant leaders rely even more on dependency help.