Еще один этюд на тему "мудрости толпы"
Психологи занялись связью личности руководителя и успеха компании в бизнесе. Цитирую предпоследний абзац статьи: "Эти результаты заставляют думать, что быстрые оценки невежественных людей (...) являются более точными, чем оценки, сделанные хорошо информированными профессионалами. Такое впечатление, что личное знакомство с топ-менеджером начисто разрушает способность адекватно оценивать его эффективность." =))
Кто б сомневался! :)
Physiognomy and success
Face value
Jan 24th 2008
From The Economist print edition
What the boss looks like determines how he performs
A COUPLE of years ago a group of management scholars from Yale and the
University of Pittsburgh tried to discover if there was a link between
a company's success and the personality of its boss. To work out what
that personality was, they asked senior managers to score their bosses
for such traits as an ability to communicate an exciting vision of the
future or to stand as a good model for others to follow. When the data
were analysed, the researchers found no evidence of a connection
between how well a firm was doing and what its boss was like. As far
as they could tell, a company could not be judged by its chief
executive any better than a book could be judged by its cover.
A few years before this, however, a team of psychologists from Tufts
University, led by Nalini Ambady, discovered that when people watched
two-second-long film-clips of professors lecturing, they were pretty
good at determining how able a teacher each professor actually was. At
the end of the study, the perceptions generated by those who had
watched only the clips were found to match those of students taught by
those self-same professors for a full semester.
Now, Dr Ambady and her colleague, Nicholas Rule, have taken things a
step further. They have shown that even a still photograph can convey
a lot of information about competence≈and that it can do so in a way
which suggests the assessments of all those senior managers were
poppycock.
Dr Ambady and Mr Rule showed 100 undergraduates the faces of the chief
executives of the top 25 and the bottom 25 companies in the Fortune
1,000 list. Half the students were asked how good they thought the
person they were looking at would be at leading a company and half
were asked to rate five personality traits on the basis of the
photograph. These traits were competence, dominance, likeability,
facial maturity (in other words, did the individual have an
adult-looking face or a baby-face) and trustworthiness.
By a useful (though hardly unexpected) coincidence, all the
businessmen were male and all were white, so there were no confounding
variables of race or sex. The study even controlled for age, the
emotional expression in the photos and the physical attractiveness of
the individuals by obtaining separate ratings of these from other
students and using statistical techniques to remove their effects.
This may sound like voodoo. Psychologists spent much of the 20th
century denigrating the work of 19th-century physiognomists and
phrenologists who thought the shapes of faces and skulls carry
information about personality. However, recent work has shown that
such traits can, indeed, be assessed from photographs of faces with a
reasonable accuracy.
And Dr Ambady and Mr Rule were surprised by just how accurate the
students' observations were. The results of their study, which are
about to be published in Psychological Science, show that both the
students' assessments of the leadership potential of the bosses and
their ratings for the traits of competence, dominance and facial
maturity were significantly related to a company's profits. Moreover,
the researchers discovered that these two connections were independent
of each other. When they controlled for the "power" traits, they still
found the link between perceived leadership and profit, and when they
controlled for leadership they still found the link between profit and
power.
These findings suggest that instant judgments by the ignorant (nobody
even recognised Warren Buffett) are more accurate than assessments
made by well-informed professionals. It looks as if knowing a chief
executive disrupts the ability to judge his performance.
Sadly, the characteristics of likeability and trustworthiness appear
to have no link to company profits, suggesting that when it comes to
business success, being warm and fuzzy does not matter much (though
these traits are not harmful). But this result also suggests yet
another thing that stockmarket analysts might care to take into
account when preparing their reports: the physog of the chief
executive.