leadership

Friends of the Nonverbal Communication Blog, this week we present the paper “Perception of emergent leaders’ faces and evolution of social cheating: cross-cultural experiments” by Rostovsteva, V. V.; Mezentseva, A. A. and Butovskaya, M. L. (2022), in which authors carry out a study to know whether the appearance of the face is a source of real information about people’s leadership skills.

From an evolutionary point of view, it is assumed that leaders will be the ones who must act in the interest of the group and facilitate coordination among group members to achieve the common good.

Some empirical studies suggest that deception can also occur in the context of human leadership, which, in turn, is closely related to the specific personality traits of each leader.

For example, people who score high in Machiavellianism in personality tests are usually perceived by others as charismatic and good leaders, and tend to occupy top management positions, especially in companies with a short track record. On the contrary, in the long term, these leaders have a detrimental effect on the careers and well-being of their followers.

In an earlier study by the same authors, where a game (based on the Public Goods Game, or iPGG) was used in which three types of leadership were revealed: first, those non-leaders; then, those with prosocial leadership; finally, those identified as leader-cheaters.

The analysis of this study revealed that each of these behaviors had a set of distinctive personality, communication and cooperation characteristics. Both prosocial and cheater-leaders were equally followed by other group members, in 88% of the cases, indicating the existence of successful communicative strategies for both types of leaders, even the cheaters, which probably allowed them to generate a sense of trust in others, despite actual deceptive intentions. This study prior to the one at hand was conducted with young Buryats from southern Siberia, a group of traditional herders of Mongolian origin.

The present study was designed to extend previous findings. The authors posed several questions, such as: do the neutral faces of the individuals have common characteristics that define them in one group or another, if so what physical and behavioral traits are attributed to each group, among others.

It was hypothesized that observers could differentiate leadership potential and leadership styles by certain physical and behavioral characteristics based on static facial information alone, and, on the other hand, the authors expected that leaders’ faces would be perceived as more masculine, stronger, dominant, and healthy compared to others.

In this study, prototype photographs were constructed from the faces of the participants in the first study. Specifically, a portrait of the non-leader, a portrait of the prosocial leader and a portrait of the leader-cheater were obtained by mixing the faces of all the participants in each group. We recall that these young people belonged to a particular ethnic group.

Then, a total of 104 young people were gathered, some of them were Russians and others were also part of the Buryat community in southern Siberia.

They divided the participants into groups. Each of the individuals in the groups had 20 tokens and among all the members they would have a common pool, which they would lose or gain depending on their opinions regarding the photographs obtained from the first study: they had to negotiate what it conveyed to them and why, and reach a consensus.

The results showed that living in a mixed-race social environment did not affect portrait judgments, as Russians did not differ from Buryats in portrait ratings or in the consistency of their judgments.

It appears that the characteristics that distinguish leader-cheaters and prosocial leaders are the shape of the eyes, lips, jaw, and eyebrows. Cheater-leaders have larger and rounder eyes, fuller lips, rounder jaw and more prominent eyebrows.

The study opens new perspectives for future research, calling for investigation of particular facial structures that may distinguish individuals with different leadership qualities. Authors recommend further study on the subject for even more conclusive insights.

If you want to know more about nonverbal behavior and how it affects personal relationships, visit our Master of Science in Nonverbal and Deceptive Behavior, which you can take in English or Spanish, with special grants for readers of the Nonverbal Communication Blog.

Friends of the Nonverbal Communication Blog, this week we present the paper “Clothes make the leader! How leaders can use attire to impact followers’ perceptions of charisma and approval”, by Maran, T.; Liegl, S.; Moder, S.; Kraus, S. and Furtnet, M. (2021), in which authors investigate how attire impacts in the perception that people have of their leaders.

Numerous examples of leaders that, on purpose, chose their attire to modify how they are perceived by others exist.

For instance, former US president George W. Bush often appeared in a cowboy hat. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, appeared in public, most of the times, wearing sneakers, sweater and simple trousers. That is to say, they managed to disrupt our expectations. In a way, they manipulated the spectator’s perception.

And we see this not only in presidents or important leaders of millionaire companies, but also in simple and daily life. For example, individuals willingly pay a higher price for luxury clothing and brands to signal their wealth and their social status. Namely, we would use these elements to stand out.

Then, if we give importance to clothing as a manipulative tool for our public image, how would this affect in work environment?

More precisely, what makes a person to be perceived as a charismatic and approved leader?

Research suggests, till now, that individuals who desire to be perceived as prototypical leaders and to earn attributions of trustworthiness, intelligence and competence, would be well-advised to dress formally, for instance, in a suit.

Here appears the first question authors make: does dressing formally make a person to be perceived as a prototypical leader?

Other questions arise. For example, authors argue that a leader dressing in a manner unconventional to a certain organizational culture, creates a contrast in the eyes of employees, resulting in greater attention being given to the leader. This means he/she will stand out.

This will make the leader to be perceived as more charismatic, and we already know that charisma is an important virtue in life in general, and business in particular.

That is why authors ask: if a leader chooses a clothing style that deviates from the organization’s cultural norms, will be perceived as more charismatic? And will he/she receive more approval?

Authors carried out some studies in order to obtain answers to these questions. The ones that we will be talking about will be just the first two experiments, because they are focused on the questions we’re interested in.

In them, individuals were presented with pictures of a designated leader from the Fortune 100 list. Then, their clothing style was systematically manipulated, and participants answered questions about the personality traits they perceived of these leaders.

Mainly, evidence in support of the idea that a leader’s clothing influences the way they are perceived by employees was found.

The first question authors asked themselves was answered. Employees perceive their leader as a prototypical leader when he/she uses formal clothing, though this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are perceived as more charismatic or more approved.

Moreover, it seems a leader should appear more charismatic to their employees and gain a higher approval rate when clothed less formally in a control-oriented culture, and more formally in a flexibility-oriented culture.

That is to say, in a control-oriented organization with formal dress code, dressing informally could be seen as being ignorant; in a flexible-oriented one, dressing formally could be interpreted as being narrow-minded.

Despite these prejudices, these people would communicate that they do not fear losing their position in the organization; they would say to us, with their deviate attires, that they can afford the social costs of not following the norm, like individuals purchasing luxury items to display their wealth to others. In that way, we stand out from others, we would do something others don’t dare to do.

This would work as a charismatic signal, because it would indicate the presence of ability outstanding enough to permit the wearer to deviate from the dress code.

There are some limitations in this study. For instance, authors point out the need of exploring other nonverbal areas, such as vocal projection or facial expressions, in the organizational leadership context. Another limitation would be the lack of leader women in the Fortune 100 list, used for the experiments.

Authors mention the utility of these studies to improve the leadership ability of people that are the head of an organization, and the way they are perceived by their employees.

A good leader can be perceived due to his/her facial features? Nonverbal Communication Blog

Clothes make the leader! How leaders can use attire to impact followers’ perceptions of charisma and approval. Nonverbal Communication Blog