Leadership Research Summary:
• Leader selection plays a key role in how human social groups are formed and maintained. Leadership is either assigned through formal processes within an organization or emerges informally through interactions with other group members–particularly in novel contexts. COVID-19 has accelerated the adoption of virtual meetings and more flexible team structures. However our understanding of how assigned leadership influences subsequent leadership emergence in virtual settings is limited. Here we examine the relationship between assigned leadership within an existing organization and subsequent emergent leadership attributions as members engage in virtual interactions.
• To do so, researchers created and implemented a novel virtual group decision-making task designed to support quantification of a more comprehensive set of communication style elements, such as speech dynamics and facial expressions, as well as task behaviors. Sixteen members of a real-world organization engaged four repeated rounds of a group decision making task with new team members each time. We found participants made novel attributions of emergent leadership rather than relying solely on existing assigned leadership.
• While assigned leadership did influence leadership attributions, communication style, including amount of speech but also variability in facial expressions, played a larger role. The behavior of these novel emergent leaders was also more consistent with expectations of leadership behavior: they spoke earlier, more often, and focused more on the correct decision than did assigned leaders. These findings suggest that, even within existing social networks, virtual contexts promote flexible group structures that depend more on communication style and task performance than assigned leadership.
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
• Multiple studies have linked communication style, particularly the quantity and timing of speech, to emergent leadership attribution (Morris and Hackman, 1969; Sorrentino and Boutillier, 1975; Kickul and Neuman, 2000; Sudweeks and Simoff, 2005). Here we predict leadership attribution from a range of communication style elements, including speech dynamics, information content of speech and facial expressions within members of a professional social network with an established assigned leadership structure. By using a novel approach, examining teleconferencing interactions in combination with a HPT, we were able to combine high experimental control with high ecological validity and quantify a more comprehensive range of communication style elements and task relevant information conveyed by each participant.
• The study’s primary research question focused on how existing assigned leadership within a social network would influence emergent leadership attribution in a teleconferencing context. Two expectations were that (1) if assigned leadership plays the same role in a teleconferencing as it does in face to face interactions it would be most predictive of leadership attribution and (2) that the behavior of assigned leaders would be most consistent with established leadership behaviors. In contrast, our model of leadership attribution demonstrated that the quantity of speech in particular, and communication style as whole, were better predictors of leadership attribution than previously-assigned leadership, which validate previous studies (Pescosolido, 2002; Zebrowitz and Montepare, 2008; Li et al., 2012; Trichas, 2017a; Slepian and Carr, 2019).
• The medium of teleconferencing has been shown to reduce the impact of existing team identity (Joshi and Roh, 2009). We speculate that this might extend to decreasing the importance of assigned leadership within a particular social network. Particularly, changes in information sharing dynamics in digital settings offer the possibility of flatter hierarchies, more flexible leadership roles (Cortellazzo et al., 2019) and greater performance. In line with this we also found that novel emergent leaders, but not assigned leaders, demonstrated patterns of communication that are classically associated with leadership, and largely consistent with a dominant leadership style (D’Errico and Poggi, 2019). They spoke earlier, engaged in more competent, task-focused communication, and increased discussion of the correct outcome. Participants therefore did not rely exclusively upon assigned leadership and instead integrated it with group members’ communication style and task behavior.
• The existing research on various aspects of team effectiveness during teleconferencing is mixed. These data argue that leadership attribution is more flexible being be more driven by accurate appraisals of current social information in teleconferencing contexts. Information shared among all members is crucial to group performance in the HPT. A flatter hierarchy, in this example with less reliance on existing assigned leadership, may allow for more a wider distribution of information contributions from the group (Cortellazzo et al., 2019) which may result in better performance for virtual groups (Pearce et al., 2009; Hoch and Kozlowski, 2014).
• Emotional regulation is thought to be an important predictor of leadership attribution (Pescosolido, 2002; Li et al., 2012). Anxiety represents a maladaptive form of emotion regulation (Cisler and Olatunji, 2012), while grit is thought to be related to successful emotional regulation and perseverance (Hwang and Nam, 2021). Perspective-taking ability is thought to support leadership through detection and management of group emotion and task relevant information (Wolff et al., 2002). We found that none of these traits had any measurable impact on leadership attribution. These findings underscore the relational nature of leadership attribution over the role of specific individual traits.
• Neither the average magnitude of signaled emotion, nor pairwise synchrony in any of these categories, predicted leadership attribution. We note that the HPT vignettes used in this study were more procedural and thus unlikely to evoke strong emotional responses, thus making the average magnitude of emotional expression less informative. Nonetheless, consistent with the findings of Slepian and Carr (2019) we found that the variability in expressiveness rather than the valence of signaled emotion positively predicted leadership attribution.
• This diminished role of signaled emotion synchrony, despite being considered important for group behavior and leadership selection, may reflect disruption of social presence and interpersonal synchrony thought to be caused by virtual interactions (Gutman et al., 2022). Expressiveness synchrony negatively predicted emergent leadership attribution, this may be the result of participants attempting to attract the attention of the group at the same time. Interpersonal competition has been found to negatively predict leadership attribution between individuals sharing individual differences such as social dominance (D’Errico, 2020). Expressiveness synchrony may also be an indication of competition in this data.