Should a boss be more than a pretty face, or is a pretty face sufficient?
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.
It wasn’t of course so much a case of whether a company leader was good looking as such, but rather how suited they appeared to be for leadership.
And interestingly, a strong correlation was found between the perceptions of the students, whether positive or not, and how well each company was performing, whether profitably or not.
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