Type and Duration
FFF-Förderprojekt, June 2023 until May 2024Coordinator
Entrepreneurship & LeadershipMain Research
Growth and ComplexityDescription
What is charisma, and how can you measure it? How do managers lead when they are tied up in front of a webcam? The current pandemic has raised a host of questions for organizational and leadership researchers. Recent work on the signaling approach to charisma, however, offers hope. This cutting-edge and innovative project will therefore examine charismatic leadership within the paradigm of signaling theory, using three forms of audiovisual computer-mediated communication: traditional, screen-based videos, familiar from programs such as Teams or Skype; more progressive, virtual reality-based videos, conceivably as highly realistic and immersive 3D videos; and simulated videos presented in VR, which reaches into current business informatics research on the use of avatars.To this end, a large sample of participants will be tested in depth over a period of months, and resulting quantitative, robust results will be examined through established inferential statistical techniques .The ability of all three media types to convey signals of executive charisma will be analyzed. The focus is on the ability of virtual reality to do so with greater acuity and clarity than traditional media. Whether leaders thus appear more charismatic to remote followers is the core question of the project; in addition, a variety of fruitful, previously untapped research directions are proposed, as is the use of new techniques in leadership and charismatic-signaling research.
Practical Application
At the core of this research project is the question of which charismatic behaviors of leaders have an optimal effect in which medium. In this way, practical recommendations for action can be developed for leaders in politics and business on how charisma capital can be optimally implemented in various media, including concrete training steps for the digital leaders of the future.Reference to Liechtenstein
The frequency of work relationships with a commuter component, and the massive increase in home offices during and after Corona, underscore that for Liechtenstein executives, a digital competence in leadership via remote media is essential. For Liechtenstein, there is also a particularly strong imperative for its economy to be expansive as it looks to the future. This is the only way to continue to guarantee the current excellent economic growth over the coming decades. Optimizing the management of internationally outsourced teams and employees in order to facilitate the expansion of domestic companies will therefore become increasingly important.Keywords
Charismatic Leadership, Digital leadership, home office, international corporate leadership
