Leadership online: Charisma matters most in video communication

Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, more and more people are working partly or entirely from home or in mobile work arrangements. At the same time, the so-called gig economy is growing. It involves the flexible assignment of short-term work to freelancers or part-time, low-wage staff via online platforms.

Both trends are accelerating the digitalization of work. However, compared to a face-to-face conversation between people in the same place, communication through digital channels offers fewer opportunities to motivate people and show charisma. This presents new challenges for managers. The impact of charismatic leadership tactics (CLTs) and the choice of communications channel (text, audio, or video) on staff performance is the subject of a new study published in the journal The Leadership Quarterly.

A charismatic leadership style can be learned; researchers speak of charismatic leadership tactics, which include verbal, paraverbal, and non-verbal means such as metaphors, anecdotes, contrasts, rhetorical questions, pitch and tone of voice, and gestures. CLTs can be objectively observed and measured. They can be selectively changed in randomized controlled trials.

What the researchers say: “Managers can use the entire range of CLTs in face-to-face meetings. Digital communication reduces the opportunities to signal charisma,” said the study’s author. “Depending on the communication channel, visual and/or acoustic cues can be missing. The question is whether people’s performance suffers as a result or if they adjust their expectations to the selected channel.”

In the first part of the study, the researchers conducted a field test with text, audio, and video communication channels in which a task description was presented neutrally in one case and with the use of as many CLTs as possible in the other. In the neutral case, video messages led to lower performance than did audio and text messages. In contrast, there were no significant differences in performance in the CLT case.

“The results show a positive correlation between video communication and charismatic communication; the charismatic video led to better performance than the neutral video,” the author explained. “So we can conclude that it’s most important for managers to convey a consistent impression when they use the video channel.”

In the second part of the study, the team had the different cases assessed with traditional questionnaires like the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) and compared the results with those from the first part. Charisma noted in the questionnaires correlated with the use of CLTs but not with staff performance. “Traditional questionnaires like the MLQ are not suitable for predicting how people will perform in mobile work situations, working from home, or in the gig economy,” concluded the author.

So, what? Long before the advent of Covid-19, the level of trust in leaders was very low. Over 70% of employees did not trust their superiors—especially senior executives. What research that’s been done since has shown a decline in trust even from those dismal levels.

Largely this is due to the increased reliance on virtual communication. The truth is that most leaders do not handle Zoom calls well, and even if they did, even if they used all the tools of CLT, there would still be a trust deficit and an overall decline in employee performance as a result.