The buddy cluster is another one of the MBA stereotypes,
again about a third of our sample.
This one shows a person who is very high on all the soft power tactics.
They're doing, all the relationship behavior is at a high frequency,
but they're almost doing no smart power whatsoever.
They're below average on that, and
again, kind of middling or ambiguous on the hard power side.
This is a cluster I wouldn't have known existed.
I kind of discovered it over the years when I would do the debrief of students,
and I would every now and then,
stumble across a group of them who were really high on the soft power tactics.
But they really weren't paying attention or even aware of the smart power ones.
Hammers are, happily, a smaller percentage of our students, but
kind of the most stereotypical in that these are hard power people.
Above average use of might and ethos, and then not doing a lot on the soft power and
smart power.
Finally we have these multis, multis are about 10% of our sample.
These are folks who are above average on all three.
They're making good use of the toolbox.
These are little budding Abraham Lincolns,
who are able to play on all 12 influence tactics.
You might ask whether it matters,
and because we have those performance measures, the reports of how much impact
participants are having in their organizations.
We can see if it matters, and this is what we find.
This is the average impact rating, the average performance rating in our survey
for members of each of the five clusters.
So the y axis shows the number of standard deviations above or
below average, the students perform at score, their impact score is.
So you see that the students in the nascent cluster,
the average impact there was -1 standard deviations.
And then on the far right, the students in the multi, the 10% of our multis,
their average impact was something like plus one standard deviation.
The middle three clusters, these are kind of one tool clusters, the analyst,
the hammer, the buddy, these are one tool clusters, are all near average, they're
very close to zero standard deviations, which means they're average impact.
Now this of course is a simplification, these are just the means for
each of the clusters.
Those are big clusters, so there's going to be a distribution.
So I just want to be more clear about that distribution, here
is the full distribution of performance scores within each of those clusters.
The top is the nascent.
And you see that, even though most of them sit below average,
the highest impactful, the best performers there,
actually do reach average, and get a little bit above average.
All the way to the bottom of the multis, and
you can see that almost all of the performance scores sit above average.
But then the left tail, there are some people in those multis, even
though they're using all those tactics, that aren't quite having their impact.
And then you can see the three one-tool factors in the middle.
All kind of straddle that average line, and you have some folks above and
some folks below.
But the big result here is the distinction across the five clusters.
These are big mean differences across the five clusters as a function of how many
tools they're actually using in their influence toolbox.