A couple of years ago a group of
management scholars from Yale and the University of Pittsburgh tried to discover
if there was a link between a company’s success and the personality of its boss.
To work out what that personality was, they asked senior managers to score their
bosses for such traits as an ability to communicate an exciting vision of the
future or to stand as a good model for others to follow. When the data were
analyzed, the researchers found no evidence of a connection between how well a
firm was doing and what its boss was like. As far as they could tell, a company
could not be judged by its chief executive any better than a book could be
judged by its cover.
A few years before this, however, a team of
psychologists from Tufts University, led by Nalini Ambady, discovered that when
people watched two-second-long film-clips of professors lecturing, they were
pretty good at determining how able a teacher each professor actually was. At
the end of the study, the perceptions generated by those who had watched only
the clips were found to match those of students taught by those self-same
professors for a full semester.
Now, Dr Ambady and her
colleague, Nicholas Rule, have taken things a step further. They have shown that
even a still photograph can convey a lot of information about competence—and
that it can do so in a way which suggests the assessments of all those senior
managers were poppycock.
Dr Ambady and Mr. Rule showed 100
undergraduates the faces of the chief executives of the top 25 and the bottom 25
companies in the Fortune 1,000 list. Half the students were asked how good they
thought the person they were looking at would be at leading a company and half
were asked to rate five personality traits on the basis of the photograph. These
traits were competence, dominance, likeability, facial maturity (in other words,
did the individual have an adult-looking face or a baby-face) and
trustworthiness.
By a useful (though hardly unexpected)
coincidence, all the businessmen were male and all were white, so there were no
confounding variables of race or sex. The study even controlled for age, the
emotional expression in the photos and the physical attractiveness of the
individuals by obtaining separate ratings of these from other students-and using
statistical techniques to remove their effects.
This may sound
like voodoo. Psychologists spent much of the 20th century denigrating the work
of 19th-century physiognomists and phrenologists who thought the shapes of faces
and skulls carry information about personality. However, recent work has shown
that such traits can, indeed, be assessed from photographs of faces with a
reasonable accuracy.
And Dr Ambady and Mr. Rule were surprised
by just how accurate the students’ observations were. The results of their
study, which are about to be published in Psychological Science, show that both
the students’ assessments of the leadership potential of the bosses and their
ratings for the traits of competence, dominance and facial maturity were
significantly related to a company’s profits. Moreover, the researchers
discovered that these two connections were independent of each other. When they
controlled for the "power" traits, they still found the link between perceived
leadership and profit, and when they controlled for leadership they still found
the link between profit and power.
These findings suggest that
instant judgments by the ignorant (nobody even recognized Warren BuffeR) are
more accurate than assessments made by well-informed professionals. It looks as
if knowing a chief executive disrupts the ability to judge his
performance.
Sadly, the characteristics of likeability and
trustworthiness appear to have no link to company profits, suggesting that when
it comes to business success, being warm and fuzzy does not matter much (though
these milts are not harmful). But this result also suggests yet another thing
that stock market analysts might care to take into account when preparing their
reports: the physiognomy of the chief executive. |
