Why Likable Leaders Seem More Effective

New research offers new evidence that subordinates tend to rate leaders based on their personal liking of that leader rather than the leader’s actual behaviors. In the study, liking a leader was positively correlated with traditional leadership measures like authentic leadership, transformational leadership, ethical leadership, and leader-employee relationship quality and negatively correlated to abusive supervision. This means that if subordinates indicated they liked their leader, then they also rated them as more transformational, authentic, and ethical (and less abusive). The implications of this are leaders need to lead, but they also need to balance out a single-minded focus on outcomes by developing a rapport with and demonstrating a high regard for their people. The bottom line is that leaders who are not liked will pay a high price as it is almost certain that their teams will evaluate them negatively on other facets of performance.