Organization's Seminar (2015-07)

Topic:Leadership and facial cues: Evidence for an evolved, domain-specific followership psychology

Speaker: Allen Grabo,VU University, Amsterdam

Time: Tuesday, 30 June, 13:30-15:00 PM

Location: Room K02, Guanghua Building 2

Abstract:

Presidential elections in the US, shareholder confidence in CEO’s, and war and peace in the Middle-East all point to the significance of leadership in human social affairs. An important adaptive challenge for all individuals and groups is to choose the right kinds of leaders. An evolutionary approach suggests that our judgments of leaders are shaped by cues conveying the ability of specific individuals to solve different coordination challenges that have confronted us throughout the course of human evolution.

An individual’s physical appearance and facial traits are key inputs into an evolved followership psychology, as many new studies suggest. For example, my own research shows that followers consistently prefer masculine-looking leaders for conflict and feminine-looking leaders for cooperation, younger leaders for promoting change and older leaders for exploiting existing resources. This suggests that facial cues of leader candidates may serve as inputs into a broader domain-specific followership psychology, and that leadership emergence may be partly explained by the perception of a congruent match between these facial cues (dominance, trust, competence, and attractiveness) and the needs of followers.

My talk will focus on the theory behind this evolutionary contingency hypothesis, give an overview of the broad range of recent experimental evidence supporting it, and identify future avenues for research, particularly in the domain of organizational psychology.

CV: http://www.gsm.pku.edu.cn/resource/uploadfiles/docs/20150623/201506230744164180.pdf

Your participation is warmly welcomed!