Bias toward progress-oriented leaders: People prefer progress- over maintenance-oriented leaders even when a maintenance orientation is required.

We uncover a dissociation between leadership preferences (for progress, protection, or maintenance-oriented leaders) and situational requirements (to make progress, protect, or maintain). Despite maintenance being crucial for sustaining groups' ongoing activity, we find a bias favoring progress-oriented leaders across contexts. In six preregistered experiments (Ntotal = 3,324), participants consistently preferred progress-oriented leaders even when they recognized maintenance as the primary situational need. In Experiment 1, people preferred progress- over maintenance-oriented political leaders in a mock-election paradigm even when maintenance was explicitly the dominant concern. In Experiment 2, participants chose progress-oriented group leaders in an incentivized group task, despite maintenance investments yielding greater monetary rewards. Furthermore, participants preferred maintenance-oriented over progress-oriented agendas but showed no (Experiment 3a) or opposite preference (Experiment 3b) when evaluating leaders who advocated identical policies. Our final studies test two explanations regarding the underlying process: Experiment 4 tests the idea that progress-oriented leaders are expected to invest more effort than others. However, manipulating perceived leader effort did not affect the preference for progress-oriented leaders. Instead, Experiment 5 identifies a different mechanism: Participants assume that progress-oriented leaders have wider goal scopes that also include maintenance goals, whereas maintenance-oriented leaders' goal scope is assumed to be limited to maintenance. Blocking this assumption by explicitly describing progress leaders as maintenance-neutral reversed the preference pattern. Together, these studies point to a systematic bias in leadership selection that persists regardless of situational demands or personal policy preferences, revealing how biased assumptions about progress-oriented leadership shape choices that undermine optimal collective decision making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).