And the CEO of Airbnb definitely has it.
By Rachel Gillett
Airbnb employees seem to love CEO Brian Chesky.
One possible reason? The startup founder's ability to inspire awe in his people.
Take for example the company's headquarters, which allows people to
transcend San Francisco and enter another world by simply picking a
conference room; the company's core mission to entirely reimagine the
way we travel today; or the endless Airbnb listings that show us homes
we never would have known existed.
It's hard to imagine an employee that hasn't at one time or another experienced large-scale wonder at work there.
People who possess the ability to elicit these feelings of awe in others
could be highly effective leaders says Paul Piff, an assistant
professor of psychology and social behavior at University of California,
Berkeley — that is if they use their powers for good.
During a series of studies recently published by the American
Psychological Association in the "Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology," Piff and his team of researchers found that inducing a
sense of awe in people could promote generous, helpful, and positive
social behavior.
"We find that awe makes people more ethical, less entitled, more
cooperative — all of which often play key roles in organizational and
workplace success," Piff explained to Business Insider.
During one study, for example, researchers had a group of volunteers
stand in a grove of towering trees and look up at them for one minute
while another group looked instead at a tall building. Then
experimenters spilled a handful of pens, seemingly by accident, and
volunteers in awe of the vast trees were deemed to be the most helpful
in picking them up.
Piff says awe also has the potential to promote curiosity and openness
to novelty, both of which are central to creativity. It could make
people more cooperative and team-oriented, more attuned to collective
interests, and identify more strongly with their organizations.
The researchers wrote that they believe awe induces a feeling of being
diminished in the presence of something greater than oneself. This
diminished sense of self shifts focus away from an individual's need and
toward the greater good.
The studies used a variety of methods to test the effect of awe
including showing video clips of nature and of colored water droplets
colliding with a bowl of milk.
"The common thread across all of those manipulations is that each one,
however different in content, exposed people to something vast that
transcended their understanding of the world, or their default mode of
seeing the world," Piff explained.
A leader could orchestrate this in a number of different ways, Piff
says, including incorporating collective rituals at work, time outdoors,
art, music, and dance.