关键词: 领导者面孔, 面孔年龄, 面孔宽高比, 面孔特质, 领导效能

Abstract: Over the years, research on leadership are dominated by trait approach and behavioral approach. Suprisingly, recent studies have found that visual cues, such as facial appearance, are increasingly playing an important role in affecting a variety of human psychological and behavior processes. Therefore, research on facial appearance has gradually extended to the domain of leadership, and revealed that leaders’ facial appearance could influence organizational performance and employees’ attitude and behavior towards leaders. Firstly, this paper introduces leaders’ facial appearance, including facial ages, facial Width–to–Height Ratio (fWHR) and facial traits. Facial ages means how old are these faces based on the perception of perceiver. fWHR represents whether the face is wide or narrow. Then, we provide an overview of research in this field and account for its theoretical basis. For example, studies found that age can influence follower’s perception of leadership style, younger-looking leaders were endorsed for exploratory change and older-looking leaders for stable exploitation. fWHR can influence negotiation performance in man. Men with greater fWHR are less cooperative negotiators compared to men with smaller facial ratios. The lack of cooperation allows men with greater fWHR to claim more value when negotiating with other men, but inhibits their ability to create agreements that benefit all negotiating parties. Also, researchers found that compared with men who had narrower faces, men who had wider faces showed more self-sacrificing cooperation to help their group members under circumstances of competition with another group. Moreover, research showed that fWHR of CEOs are related to the performance of their companies. Facial traits can affect election results, organizational performance and employees’ attitude towards leaders. Specifically, attractiveness, competence and maturity can affect election results. Also, leaders may be chosen depend on particular situations. During time of war, a dominant-appearing leader may inspire confidence and intimidate enemies, while during peace-time, negotiation and diplomacy are needed, interpersonal skills may outweigh the value of a dominant leader. In line with these ideas, masculine-faced leaders are favored in war-time scenarios while feminine-faced leaders are favored in peace-time scenarios. As for organizational performance there are some research indicated that, not only agentic traits(control,powerful), but also communal traits (sympathy,support,warmth) can influence organizational performance. Research about employees’ attitude toward leaders showed that managers of higher perceived likeability were less preferred than candidates of lower perceived likeability. In addition, research has found that competent-looking political candidates do better in U.S. elections while babyfaced individuals are generally perceived to be less competent than maturefaced individuals. This suggests that babyfaced political candidates are perceived as less competent and therefore do worse in elections. It’s called “Babyface effect”. There are two main theoretical perspectives--cognitive psychology and evolutionary psychology to explain why leaders’ face can influence organizational performance and the employees’ perception, attitude and behavior towards leaders. Finally, future research can further explore the babyface effect of Chinese leaders, and the moderating role of contingency factors ,such as environment (within organization-outside organization).

Key words: leaders’ facial appearance, facial ages, fWHR, facial traits, organizational performance