The Leader’s Face: Bosses Share Certain Facial Features
There are many criticisms of systems based on a leader and rigid hierarchies The Peter Principle, for example, is based on the idea that employees are promoted until you reach your point of maximum incompetence. Hence, in many organizations it is evident that the most important positions are occupied by people who do not know very well what they do, that is, by leaders who have taken their capabilities to an unacceptable limit. However, what we all expect from an organization with people who command and people who follow orders, is that the former, regardless of their level of relative competence, have at least reached their position by own merits
To what extent is the job of personnel selection being done in this regard? Well, according to research in psychology, it seems that hierarchical companies and organizations are a drain of involuntary opportunists People who, without knowing it, benefit from having certain facial features.
The study, which was published in the journal The Leadership Quarterly, shows that a series of people chosen at random are able to know what leaders do just by looking at black and white photographs of their faces. This would mean that the people who appear in the images could have reached their positions of responsibility, in part, thanks to a certain unconscious predisposition to choose leaders with certain facial features.
These researchers conclude that the people in charge of selecting the high responsibility profiles They could be relying on criteria as irrational as the evaluation of the face when selecting a candidate. But not only that: each position requires a special type of leadership, and also the facial features chosen in leaders vary depending on the position they choose.
Researchers have relied on a series of experiments to reach this conclusion. The first thing they did is verify that there are studies in which facial appearance is related to the probability of reaching leadership positions. However, they focused on the biases that presumably exist when assigning specific leadership positions to people only by evaluating their faces.
To do this, they selected 614 volunteers residing in Great Britain and individually showed them a series of black and white photographs showing the faces of certain American leaders, not known on the other side of the Atlantic. This group of leaders was made up of CEOs of large companies, army generals, governors elected between 1996 and 2006, and sports coaches. Each participant was named a category (for example, “army generals”), and from that moment on he had to say Which of the two faces that were shown to him corresponded to that type of leader Then, each of them expressed their degree of confidence in their “divination” abilities by scoring themselves on a scale from 0 to 100.
The truth is that, despite tending towards pessimism when evaluating their degree of certainty in decisions, the volunteers were unusually skillful when it comes to relating leaders to their real profession. The only type of leader that resisted them was that of politicians, since in these cases they were not correct more than expected by chance (that is, 50% of the time).
Leadership, traits and stereotypes
In a second experiment conducted by the same team of researchers, 929 British participants evaluated 80 of the faces of senior officials on 15 different aspects: extraversion, masculinity, charisma, etc. This time, however, the volunteers didn’t know they were seeing leaders’ faces. They were not given any additional information about the people in the photographs.
As a result of this exercise, the researchers found that certain leaders tended to score high on some dimensions that are related to stereotypes specific to their professional area. For example, military men’s faces scored high on masculinity and low on warmth, while CEOs scored high on “level of competence.” It should be remembered that these scores were given by people who had no idea who they were evaluating.
The problem
This line of research is one more example that many organizations They are not being as rational as one would expect when selecting its leaders, people with a high responsibility for the collective success of the company. Important personnel selectors could be getting carried away by subjective assessments about what the appearance of senior officials should be like, strictly following the canons dictated by the stereotype.
Of course, evaluating someone’s face may be easier than measuring such abstract aspects as leadership the social skills waves negotiation skills ; among other things, because judging someone by their aesthetics is an automatic process. However, it is still true that organizations based on the complexity of teamwork also deserve an equally complex and rational selection of personnel.
The human Resources They are once again in the spotlight (or, at least, in the spotlight of the Americans).
