The face of the leader: bosses share certain facial features.

Top managers could be getting promoted by the face... literally.

There are many criticisms of systems based on a leader y rigid hierarchies. The Peter Principle, for example, is based on the idea that employees are promoted until they reach their until they reach their point of maximum incompetence .. Hence, in many organizations it is evident that the most important positions are occupied by people who do not know what they are doing very well, i.e. by leaders who have pushed their capabilities to an unacceptable limit. However, what we all expect from an organization with people who give orders and people who follow orders is that the former, regardless of their relative level of competence, should at least have reached their position on their own merits. merit.

How well is recruitment being done in this regard? For, according to research in psychology, it seems that hierarchical companies and organizations are a breeding ground for unwitting opportunists. unwitting opportunists. People who, without knowing it, benefit from having certain facial features.

Leaders who are leaders by face

The study, which was published in the journal The Leadreship Quarterlyshows that a series of randomly selected people are able to tell 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 profiles of high responsibility may be relying on such irrational criteria as facial assessment 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 according to the position they are applying for.

Divination

The researchers have based themselves on a series of experiments to reach this conclusion. The first thing they did was to note that there are studies linking facial appearance and the likelihood of achieving leadership positions. However, they focused on the biases that presumably exist in assigning specific leadership positions to people by evaluating their faces alone.

To do this, 614 volunteers residing in Great Britain were selected and individually shown 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 consisted of CEOs of major companies, army generals, governors elected between 1996 and 2006, and sports coaches. Each participant was given a category (e.g., "Army generals"), and was then asked to say which of the two faces he or she was asked to identify. which of the two faces he was shown corresponded to that type of leader.. Then, each of them expressed their degree of confidence in their "divinatory" abilities by scoring themselves on a scale from 0 to 100.

The truth is that, despite tending toward pessimism when it came to evaluating their degree of certainty in their decisions, the volunteers showed themselves to be unusually skillful when it came to matching leaders with their actual profession. The only type of leader that resisted them was that of politicians, since in these cases they were no more correct than expected by chance (i.e., 50% of the time).

Leadership, traits and stereotypes

In a second experiment conducted by the same team of researchers, 929 British participants rated 80 of the faces of senior officials on 15 different aspects: extraversion, masculinity, charisma, etc. This time, however, the volunteers did not know they were looking at leaders' faces. They were not provided with 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 stereotypes specific to their professional area. For example, military faces scored high on masculinity and low on warmth, while CEOs scored high on "level of competence." It is worth remembering that these scores were given by people who had no idea who they were evaluating.

The problem

This line of research is further evidence that many organizations are not being as rational as they should be. are not being as rational as one might expect when selecting leaders. in selecting their leaders, people with a high level of responsibility for the collective success of the company. Leading recruiters may be being swayed by subjective judgments about what senior leaders should look like, following stereotypical canons to the letter.

Of course, assessing someone's face may be easier than measuring such abstract aspects as leadership ability. leadership abilityleadership social skills or negotiation negotiation skillsAmong other things, because judging someone by his or her aesthetics is an automatic process. However, it remains true that organizations based on the complexity of teamwork also deserve an equally complex and rational selection of personnel.

The human resources are once again in the spotlight (or, at least, in the spotlight of Americans).