The leader's face: bosses share certain facial features

There are many criticisms of systems based on a Leader Y rigid hierarchies. The peter principle, for example, he relies 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 held by people who does not know very well what he is doing, that is, by leaders who have taken their capacities to a limit assumable. However, what we all expect from an organization with people who rule 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 staff pick in this sense? Well, according to research in psychology, it seems that hierarchical companies and organizations are a drain of involuntary opportunists. People who unknowingly benefit from having certain facial features.

Leaders who are by face

The study, which was published in the journal The Leadreship Quarterly

, shows that a series of people chosen at random is 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 traits facials.

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 the leaders vary according to the position they choose.

Fortune telling

Researchers have relied on a series of experiments to reach this conclusion. The first thing they did is to verify that there are studies in which facial appearance and the probabilities of achieving leadership positions. However, they focused on the biases that presumably exist in assigning specific leadership positions to people just by evaluating their faces.

To do this, they selected 614 volunteers residing in Great Britain and were individually shown a series of black and white photographs showing the faces of certain American leaders, unknown 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, "generals of the navy"), and from that moment on he had to say which of the two faces that were shown corresponded to that type of leader. Then each of them expressed their degree of confidence in their "divinatory" abilities by scoring 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 showed themselves unusually skilled when it comes to relating leaders to their actual profession. The only type of leader that resisted them was that of the politicians, since in these cases they were not more correct 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 in 15 different aspects: extraversion, masculinity, charisma, etc. This time, however, the volunteers were unaware that they were seeing leaders' faces. They were not provided with any additional information about the people in the photos.

As a result of this exercise, the researchers found that certain leaders tended to score high in some dimensions that are related to 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 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 sample that many organizations they are not being as rational as you might expect when selecting its leaders, people with high responsibility for the collective success of the company. Important recruiters could be getting carried away by subjective judgments about how the appearance of high positions should be, strictly following the canons dictated by the stereotype.

Of course, evaluating someone's face can be easier than measuring such abstract aspects as the 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 that of the Americans).