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The Face of Success

First impressions are powerful and rich sources of information about other people, and studies have demonstrated that they predict performance in numerous domains, such as teaching (Ambady & Rosenthal, 1993) and electoral success (Todorov, Mandisodza, Goren, & Hall, 2005). Much of this work, however, has employed outcome variables that are subjective. For example, in the study of teacher effectiveness, both the predictor (naive observers’ ratings) and the outcome (teaching evaluations) were based on subjective opinions. Similarly, electoral success is based on voters’ impressions of candidates, which are also responsible for which candidates are elected. In the current study, we examined the relation between a subjective predictor and an objective performance outcome: Are impressions of chief executive officers (CEOs) related to the performance of their companies? Despite the ubiquitous perception of the CEO as the embodiment of a company, there is no clear evidence of any relation betweenCEOs’ personalities and their companies’success (Ranft, Zinko, Ferris, & Buckley, 2006). Although some studies show that mediating factors, such as environmental context, can link factors like CEOs’ charisma to companies’ performance, no direct relation between CEOs’ personalities and companies’ success has been found (Agle, Nagarajan, Sonnenfeld, & Srinivasan, 2006; Tosi, Misangyi, Fanelli, Waldman, & Yammarino, 2004). Previous research, however, has shown that personality traits associated with the evaluation of leadership overlap with traits that can be judged reliably from the face. These traits include competence, likeability, and trustworthiness (Todorov et al., 2005) and dominance (Hess, Adams, & Kleck, 2005). Another facial feature related to judgments of leadership is facial maturity (Zebrowitz & Montepare, 2005). Are these variables that can be gauged from facial information also associated with leaders’ success and performance? To answer this question, we asked participants to make naive personality judgments from the photographs of the CEOs from the 25 highest and 25 lowest ranked companies of the Fortune1,000 and examinedwhether these judgments related to measures of the companies’ financial success.