As inequality has risen, it’s hard to muster much sympathy for the leaders of our organizations, for whom so much of the wealth that has been generated in recent years has gone to.  New research from BerkeleyHaas is perhaps unlikely to shift the sympathy needle too much, but it does nonetheless highlight the damage the stresses of leadership has on those at the top.

The researchers used a range of methods, including photographic analysis software, to explore what kind of impact leadership has, with a very real impact on the life expectancy of leaders uncovered.

“The health implications of stress are a very under-studied dimension for many jobs,” the researchers explain. “We were interested in seeing how these pressures and tensions at work can make your life more or less fulfilling.”

Hostile takeovers

The researchers framed their analysis through the lens of hostile takeovers, which they reasoned cause considerable stress in the boardroom.  They highlight how some states in the US have laws to protect firms from them, which they hypothesize would help to lower stress levels for executives at these firms.

They trawled back to the mid-1980s, when such laws began to enter the statute book, and correlated the passing of these laws with the life expectancy of around 1,600 executives serving as CEOs between 1970 and 1991.  The analysis revealed a clear correlation between insulation from takeovers and life expectancy, with the threat of takeover appearing to take two years off of the CEOs life.

“You might think that’s not a lot,” the researchers explain, “but actually it’s huge. It’s comparable to having been born decades later, or to a significant health hazard, such as smoking for years of your life.”

Financial shock

The hypothesis was further examined by looking at financial shocks to various industries.  This enabled the team to contrast the health of executives in industries that had gone through such turmoil with those who had not.  Again, those who had lived through this financial stress appeared to live around two years less than their peers.

Finally, the researchers used facial recognition software to judge the relative ages of CEOs before and after the 2008 financial crisis.  The researchers submitted over 3,000 photos of over 450 executives, and found that the apparent age of each executive increased by just over a year having lived through the crisis.  The highly visible display of stress in these executives highlights the impact stress can have on our health.

“An important aspect of any job is whether your life has high quality, but that is not always as emphasized as other factors, such as a the financial calculus,” the researchers say. “If people knew that entering a job meant their risk of heart attack would be higher, or they might die earlier, would they make different choices? We hope this is a first step in people thinking about that.”

Of course, such stresses are unlikely to be limited to the boardroom, and the researchers believe that similar stresses, if not more, are likely to be visible lower down the organization too.

“It’s is easier to look at this with CEOs, but I would worry even more about people at the bottom of an organization in dealing with stress and financial constraints,” the researchers conclude.