M. Van Dijke and M. Poppe report results of a series of experiments to illustrate whether people seek power over others.
They concluded that people are more motivated to decrease their dependence on other people’s power (bold added) than they are to increase their power over others. In other words, they believe we’re driven to increase our ‘personal power’ over ourselves, but not necessarily our ‘social power’ over others.
I wonder how this conclusion relates to the way teachers operate in classrooms and administrators conduct their duties?
Here’s an interesting but politically sensitive dissertation topic for someone. Observe whether teachers give priority to decreasing or increasing their power over students and then measure relationships of those priorities to student classroom academic performance.
More specific, do teachers who support student use of Tablet PCs in classrooms assist students to decrease teachers’ power over them? And how does that power shift affect measured student academic performance.