About face! facial status cues and perceptions of charismatic leadership

Abstract

Leaders of every organizational stripe-corporate, political, military, religious, and others-use facial status cues to alarm and disarm, threaten and appease and repulse and beguile. Status cues refer to the signaling behaviors and appearances that energize approach/avoidance motives in perceivers and actors. According to Status Cues Theory, dual status messages are required to achieve the long, psychological reach of charismatic leadership. Leaders must exude formidability, thereby elevating the leadership role and making it hard to challenge. But effective leaders must also signal receptivity to motivate followers to identify with the leader, the collective, and the collective goal. This chapter highlights the role of the face as a platform for status signaling. Preliminary evidence supports the idea that dual status cues and the motives they engender are essential to charismatic leadership, and that the optimal balance of status cues shifts with leader gender and race, and with sociopolitical and cultural context.