In a famous experiment with nursery school children, psychologist F. T. Merei organized relatively passive children into play groups and let them play for several days with the same toys and games. Each group developed its own behavior patterns as well as its own traditions of who played with which toys. Once these patterns were set, Merei added an older child to each group, introducing the newcomer as the leader. For this role, he chose children who were eighteen months older than the others and who had shown signs of dominance in other situations at the nursery school. All of these new leaders tried to take charge, but most failed. Merei's explanation: "The group absorbed the leader, forcing its traditions on him." The one leader who succeeded did so only after several group members spent several days smoothing the way.

Corporations are not nursery schools, of course, and a chief executive's position carries considerably more weight than the nominal power Merei conferred simply by announcing to the group that the new member would be its leader. But the enormous pull exerted by a group makes it hard for new leaders to effect any change at all, much less act as quickly as corporate saviors are expected to.