Pygmalian Leadership

Pygmalion leadership Model

What is Pygmalion leadership theory and how can it be used in business?

In a Greek myth written by Ovid, Pygmalion is a sculptor who creates an ivory statue of his ideal women and falls in love with it. Pygmalion treats the statue as his lover and prays to the Goddess Aphrodite to bring his creation to life. Aphrodite grants him his wish and brings the statue Galatea as she is known to life. Pygmalion and Galatia marry and go on to further adventures. Pygmalion sees and treats his statue of Galatia as real and so she becomes real. This effect is sometimes called self fulfilling prophecy.

More recently we have George Bernard Shaw to thank for bringing this story to the Twentieth Century. In his play “Pygmalion” and later the musical “My Fair Lady” we see a flower girl, Eliza Doolittle who is transformed into a Duchess by Professor Henry Higgins.

We learn in this adaptation that much or Eliza’s transformation is not so much what she learns but what she and others believe. As Eliza say in the play:

“You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves but how she’s treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will, but I know I can be a lady to you because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.”

Eliza is saying if I believe I am a lady and you believe I am a lady then a lady I must be.

Can what people think about us and in turn what we think about ourselves actually be reality? “Self fulfilling prophecies are predictions about some future behavior or event that can modify its outcome so as to produce what is expected.” (Zimbrardo & Weber, 1997)

Both of the above mentioned works are fiction, but there are many scientific studies that show the Pygmalion theory to be more than a just a fanciful play or a...