Why Bosses tend to be blowhards

The latest issue of TIME (Asia version) has an interesting article on a study conducted by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology which concluded that leadership is very often just "loudership" - People are likelier to be perceived as leaders if they offer more answers, even if those answers are wrong. Some excerpts from the article:

"Psychologists know one way to become a leader is simply to act like one. Speak up, speak well and offer lots of ideas, and people begin to do what you say..."

"(In the first part of the study where the players were given the task to organise an NPO) Both players and judges considered the people who spoke up the most to be higher in such qualities as "general intelligence". The ones who didn't speak much scored higher in traits like "conventional" and "uncreative"."

"(In the second part of the study where the players were set to work on solving math problems) Often the ones who were rated the highest (in the study) were not the ones who gave the most correct answers. Nor were they the ones whose SAT scores suggested they'd even able to. What they did do was offer the most answers - period. Even though they were not more competent, dominant individuals behaved as if they were. And the team fell for it: fully 94% of the time, they used the first answer anyone shouted out."