Quanta Corporate Citizenship Do you look too trustworthy to be a CEO? 27/04/2010
Have you ever wondered why successful people look good? An ever increasing pile of scientific literature is finding that actually, there is a cause-consequence: good-looking people tend to be more successful. Not because they are necessarily more intelligent, talented or any other attribute, but simply because our primitive brains are wired to accept the prominence of better genes, which, for millions of years, were expressed primarily by physical attributes. As Harvard professor Nancy Etcoff, author of Survival of the Prettiest put it, “beautiful ornaments develop not just to charm the opposite sex with bright colors and lovely songs, but to intimidate rivals and win the intrasex competition”.
Needless to say that, although our primitive brains tend to default to judgments made on the 'blink of an eye', as Malcolm Gladwell famously named his book, that does not mean that better looking people are better people. For instance, Mary Collins and Leslie Zebrowitz have found that, although baby-faced individuals are deemed less intelligent by our primitive brains, they are actually, on average, more intelligent. As a matter of fact, they are not just more intelligent, but also more assertive, brave and aggressive, which are all elements that one would not expect from a docile-looking person.
Other researches, such as Daniel Hamermesh and Jeff Biddle, have found that physical beauty is also closely related to wages and career progression.
Now, research entitled A Corporate Beauty Contest, by John Graham and Manju Puri, from Duke University, has turned its attention to the faces of CEOs, their paychecks and performances.
They looked at four different facial attributes of CEOs – attractiveness, competence, trustworthiness, and likability - and found that CEOs tend to have facial characteristics linked to the perception of competency and beauty and, at the same time, generally have faces considered to be less likable or trustworthy. Among these four characteristics, the two that standout most are likability and competency, both directly opposite attributes displayed by baby-faced individuals. In other words, boards tend to select individuals who ‘look mature’, i.e., with facial traits that give them an aggressive look. As they put it, “individuals who appear more competent and less likable are more likely to be CEOs. We similarly find these two traits are also significantly related to the CEO heading a larger company.”
Furthermore, CEOs looking mature simply make more money for themselves than those looking less mature. “We find that CEOs who are judged to be more competent-looking tend to also earn higher wages”, “Our evidence supports the idea that in the market for CEOs there is a ‘competent looks’ wage premium”.
But could the higher wages be linked to the fact that the ‘mature looking’ CEOs produce better results for their companies?
Not really. Graham and Puri also tested for that, and concluded that they do not produce above-average results. “We examined the performance of the firms run by CEOs to see if facial attributes are related to performance, by running regressions similar to the ones for CEO compensation. We find no evidence that competent looking CEOs demonstrate better firm performance.”
And what does this have to do with CSR? Simply put, if strategic social responsibility involves taking rational rather than emotional decisions in order to generate higher impact and above-average outcomes, leaders need to be self-aware about the frames they are using to take their decisions. As Graham and Puri put it, “inferences from facial appearances can be misleading, i.e., having the appearance of a facial trait does not mean one will actually display that trait”. And promoting and paying higher salaries based on facial appearances (and not on outcome) is not the best way to be socially responsible towards employees and shareholders.
- Gus
Needless to say that, although our primitive brains tend to default to judgments made on the 'blink of an eye', as Malcolm Gladwell famously named his book, that does not mean that better looking people are better people. For instance, Mary Collins and Leslie Zebrowitz have found that, although baby-faced individuals are deemed less intelligent by our primitive brains, they are actually, on average, more intelligent. As a matter of fact, they are not just more intelligent, but also more assertive, brave and aggressive, which are all elements that one would not expect from a docile-looking person.
Other researches, such as Daniel Hamermesh and Jeff Biddle, have found that physical beauty is also closely related to wages and career progression.
Now, research entitled A Corporate Beauty Contest, by John Graham and Manju Puri, from Duke University, has turned its attention to the faces of CEOs, their paychecks and performances.
They looked at four different facial attributes of CEOs – attractiveness, competence, trustworthiness, and likability - and found that CEOs tend to have facial characteristics linked to the perception of competency and beauty and, at the same time, generally have faces considered to be less likable or trustworthy. Among these four characteristics, the two that standout most are likability and competency, both directly opposite attributes displayed by baby-faced individuals. In other words, boards tend to select individuals who ‘look mature’, i.e., with facial traits that give them an aggressive look. As they put it, “individuals who appear more competent and less likable are more likely to be CEOs. We similarly find these two traits are also significantly related to the CEO heading a larger company.”
Furthermore, CEOs looking mature simply make more money for themselves than those looking less mature. “We find that CEOs who are judged to be more competent-looking tend to also earn higher wages”, “Our evidence supports the idea that in the market for CEOs there is a ‘competent looks’ wage premium”.
But could the higher wages be linked to the fact that the ‘mature looking’ CEOs produce better results for their companies?
Not really. Graham and Puri also tested for that, and concluded that they do not produce above-average results. “We examined the performance of the firms run by CEOs to see if facial attributes are related to performance, by running regressions similar to the ones for CEO compensation. We find no evidence that competent looking CEOs demonstrate better firm performance.”
And what does this have to do with CSR? Simply put, if strategic social responsibility involves taking rational rather than emotional decisions in order to generate higher impact and above-average outcomes, leaders need to be self-aware about the frames they are using to take their decisions. As Graham and Puri put it, “inferences from facial appearances can be misleading, i.e., having the appearance of a facial trait does not mean one will actually display that trait”. And promoting and paying higher salaries based on facial appearances (and not on outcome) is not the best way to be socially responsible towards employees and shareholders.
- Gus
Add Comment
