Leadership has undoubtedly become more difficult as a result of the Covid pandemic that forced many workforces to go virtual for prolonged periods. Research from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology demonstrates how managers need to work especially hard to make a consistent impression when communicating virtually.
The researchers examined how charismatic leadership works via text, audio, and video communication channels. They focused particularly on the mobile and gig economies, where management is typically always done remotely.
Virtual leadership
The rise in digital working since the start of the pandemic has placed new pressures on managers who have had to adapt their face-to-face style to a virtual environment that offers fewer opportunities to exhibit charisma.
Charismatic leadership typically (CLT) encompasses a range of verbal, non-verbal, and paraverbal tactics, including anecdotes, rhetoric, and metaphors. It’s something the researchers believe can be relatively easily measured and observed.
“Managers can use the entire range of CLTs in face-to-face meetings. Digital communication reduces the opportunities to signal charisma,” they explain. “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.”
Effective communication
The researchers asked participants to present a task description both neutrally and via various CLTs. The results found that performances fell when neutral messages were delivered via video compared to audio and text. This wasn’t the case with more charismatic delivery, where there were no significant differences.
“The results show a positive correlation between video communication and charismatic communication; the charismatic video led to better performance than the neutral video,” the researchers explain. “So we can conclude that it’s most important for managers to convey a consistent impression when they use the video channel.”
The authors then concluded their research by assessing each of the different cases using various traditional questionnaires, such as the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ). They compared the results from these questionnaires with the results achieved in their initial experiments.
These showed that while there was a general correlation between the charisma found in the CLTs and in the questionnaires, there was no correlation with ultimate 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,” the authors conclude.
