The impact of physical attraction to the perception of charismatic leadership

This Bachelor thesis seeks to analyze if the physical attraction of the leader has any impact for the followers, when they assess charismatic leadership. Charismatic leaders have been consistently shown as the most followed, yet, what precisely constitutes charisma, still remains unclear. So far, researchers have mainly focused on leader traits or follower traits, while the newest perspective agrees, that charisma is the interaction between leader and followers. Although almost all theories share the notion that charismatic leadership is assessed by the followers unconsciously, signal and embodiment theories of the charismatic leadership does not emphasize what signals in particular are the most important for the followers. Despite of it, an evolutionary perspective on charismatic leadership theory has a strong argument that physical attractiveness might significantly constitute to the perception of charisma. They argue that charisma is a strong signal of a person‘s ability to solve coordination challenge requiring urgent collective action from group members. By ephasizing this, perspective states that physical attractiveness is unconsciously related to the better social abilities of the leader. The main problem of this thesis is the disagreement between the theories in emphasizing the importance of the physical attractiveness signal. The aim of this paper is to know, if the physical attraction has a significant impact to the perception of charismatic leader, as the evolutionary theory would claim. The hypothesis of the research is constructed with the reference to the evolutionary theory and predicts the positive influence of the physical attractiveness of face to the perception of the charismatic leadership. Dependent variable is the perception of the charismatic leader, independent – the physical attraction. In order to achieve the aim of this paper, these tasks were determined: • To discuss the evolutionary charismatic leadership theory and the theoretical structure of the physical attractiveness; • To construct the hypothesis about the impact of the physical attractiveness to the perception of charismatic leadership, based on the evolutionary theory; • To conduct the quasi-experiment by measuring the perception of the charisma; • To analyze the results and test the hypothesis; • To provide recommendations for the future researches. The research of the thesis is being done by conducting two quasi-experiments, used to estimate the causal impact of the intervention without random assignment. All participants of the research were divided in two groups, one of them was experimental, the other one – controlled. Both groups got the questionnaires, with the speech of the charismatic leader, photo and the statements to estimate. The difference between materials, which groups got, were that the first (controlled) group got the photo with the ,,basic“ face, while the experimental group received the photo with the physically attractive face. Also, there were controlled variables in the conducted research – values (measured by the Schwartz survey) and gender. The participants were the students of the Ist and IIIrd courses in IIRPS VU, 140 students in total. The analysis of the results showed, that the physical attractivenes of the leader has a significant impact to the perception of the charismatic leadership, while there was a statistically significant difference between experimental groups in evaluating the statements about charismatic leadership. It is also important to mention, that some other controlled variables had a meaningful impact as well: gender and three of the Schwart‘s value survey statements, which represents conformism, universalism and achievement values. It would be benefitial to do the similar researches on the topic of charismatic leadership in the future, taking into account the importance of the physical attractiveness element