Leadership-Interview-Transkript - Sozialpsychologie - Goethe ...

important, because it´s a pretty large department.And so in terms of directly inspiring me, I
had …I was far along of my career at that point, so I have had many department chairs and
deans and university presidents and some of them were better than others. I did sort of take
some lessons from them and as a woman I of cause was always interested to see how women
perform. I did have one department chair, I unfortunatelyonly very briefly, because she
moved on to another university…but this was fairlyearly in my career when I was at Purdue
University in the psychology department. Betty Cappoldi was her name and she went on to
become a provost at a couple of universities and is now. So I guess she was the first
department chair who was a woman and so she had a very positive spirit and a lot a good
humor. And so I noticed when I went to talk to her I always had a good time and she kind of
had a way of solving problems. So, she was a sort of very positive people, a very likeably
extroverted woman and she had the sense not that you know the psychology department is
being blocked and we can´t get what we want, you know the negative approach. But the
positive approach, that her job was that things work for people. And I thought “wow” that´s
refreshing! And so I sort of carried that away in terms of a personal mode. I don´t think I ever
did things that well she does them but I certainly carried that away as a model that I store.
Probably because she was doing such a great job.
Rolf van Dick: You as a leader when you were department chair or now when you lead your
team of PhD´s and Postdocs. What do you think is particularly good? How do you lead and
how do you say this is helpful or useful?
Alice Eagly: Yeah, well…I try to be positive. I think it´s good to be a boost, particularly as
department chair, you know to get the message that I think this is a great department and we
are getting greater, you know…sort of a bit of the charismatic, you know. I´m trying to
symbolize some of the good qualities of the psychology department and then to have
confidence in people. But then there is problem solving, you know. And there´s a lot of
managerial part to it. So one of the things I did because it the psychology department that I
led was very undermanaged and any procedures had remained very informal, which is not
necessarily bad, but if you have a graduate program and sort of never have a document
describing the rules and things like that, it´s undermanaged. So I also have a sense of a
managerial responsibility to make the department work more smoothly in a way that is more
transparent. And then it´s ultimately fairer when procedures are transparent dividing various
resources and everybody knows how it´s done, they know how much resources we have. Then
that´s more transparency and more fairness. So that was another one of my themes because I
think in the inadvertently a lot of procedures in that department that have been sort of just
kind of personally arranged and not to be unfair but still it could end up that way. Cause some
people won´t ask for resources. They just go along with other people and say “give me this,
give me that”. And since then if you don´t have any sort of system for making it fair then
everybody accepts and the system ends up being unfair and ultimately some people are
unhappy. So I think that was one of the themes I tried to bring that forth and make it a bit of a
legacy of my period of time.
Rolf van Dick: Do you think that´s a female thing to approach things, to create procedures
that are fair to everyone and transparent, whereas men traditionally use the Old Boys
Networks to get what they need?
Alice Eagly: Well, you could exercise more direct power if you keep it all to yourself as a
leader and so, as you said men might be more motivated to hold power and that´s how
department chairmen do it. You have to come to me and I´m may or not may I give your
travel money or whatever. And my notion was that everybody should know how much travel