Vision, Delivery and Results: What Makes a Leader Seem Charismatic, in Eight Versions of One Speech

By Noam Shemla · The Studies

TL;DR Awamleh and Gardner showed 304 students a videotaped speech by an invented chief executive of a software company, in eight versions. The speech was visionary or not, delivered strongly or weakly, and the company was described as doing well or badly. All three changed how charismatic and effective the leader seemed. The authors singled out the strength of the delivery as an especially important influence.

• Paper: Awamleh, R., & Gardner, W. L. (1999). Perceptions of leader charisma and effectiveness: The effects of vision content, delivery, and organizational performance. The Leadership Quarterly, 10(3), 345–373.
• Participants: 304 undergraduate students.
• Design: A 2 × 2 × 2 experiment: visionary or non-visionary content, strong or weak delivery, high or low company performance. Each student saw one of the eight versions.
• Measures: Ratings of the leader’s charisma and effectiveness, analysed together, with each student’s tendency to romanticise leadership as a covariate.
• Access: Subscription-only. This summary rests on the published abstract; the effect sizes in the paper were not available to us.

When people judge a leader, they have three kinds of evidence: what the leader says, how the leader says it, and how the organisation is doing. Raed Awamleh and William Gardner set out to separate them in a single experiment.1

They were building on two earlier studies by Sherry Holladay and Timothy Coombs. The first found that the same charismatic message, delivered strongly or weakly, produced different judgements of charisma.2 The second varied content and delivery together and found both mattered, but delivery more.3 Awamleh and Gardner added the third kind of evidence, performance, because in real life a leader’s words always arrive alongside results.

Eight versions of one speech

The speaker was a fictitious chief executive of a software company, on video. Three things were varied, each in two ways, and every combination was made, giving eight versions.

The eight conditions

The design answers a question a real speech cannot. A strong speaker with a good vision at a thriving company will be admired, but it is impossible to tell which of the three did the work. Here the same vision was delivered strongly and weakly, and the same delivery went with good and bad results.

What changed the verdict

After watching, students rated how charismatic and how effective the leader was. The analysis also allowed for each student’s general tendency to credit leaders with an organisation’s success, measured with a short version of the Romance of Leadership Scale, because people who romanticise leadership might rate any chief executive more highly.

The headline finding is about delivery: of the three, it was the one the authors single out. Students did respond to what the speaker said and to how the company was doing, but how the speech was delivered carried special weight in whether its speaker seemed charismatic and effective.

Has it held up?

The finding sits in a consistent line of experiments. Holladay and Coombs had already found delivery the stronger influence on perceived charisma.3 Four years after this study, Gardner varied delivery again, alongside whether the leader presented as exemplary or pragmatic and had a reputation for honesty or for deception. A strong delivery again produced higher ratings of charisma and effectiveness, and the combination of strong delivery and an ethical reputation produced the highest ratings of effectiveness and integrity.4

The idea also shaped later work on teaching charisma. When Antonakis and colleagues built their list of charismatic leadership tactics, they separated what leaders say from how they say it, citing this study, and three of their twelve tactics are about delivery: an animated voice, facial expression and gestures. Training people in those tactics made them look more charismatic and more leader-like to observers.5

What this study cannot tell you

• How big each effect was. We could read only the abstract, which reports which effects were significant but not their sizes, so “especially important” is the authors’ judgement, not a number we can show.
• Whether it transfers to real leaders. The chief executive was fictitious and the audience was students watching a video, with no stake in the company.
• What strong delivery consisted of. The abstract does not describe the manipulation in detail.
• Whether delivery can rescue a weak case in the long run. A single speech, judged immediately, is exactly where first impressions dominate.

What a speaker can take from it

The same vision, spoken with energy and conviction, made its speaker seem more charismatic and more effective than when it was spoken flatly, and this held even alongside information about how the company was actually doing. Content mattered too; it just did not carry the speech on its own.

For anyone who has to present a plan, the lesson is to rehearse the delivery as seriously as the argument. A good vision, delivered weakly, is heard as a weaker vision.

This article summarises a subscription-only paper from its published abstract. The earlier and later studies are summarised from their published abstracts, and the account of the charismatic leadership tactics from the full text of Antonakis et al. (2011). The table of conditions and the model equation describe the design; neither reproduces results from the paper.

Measured

• Students’ ratings of a video leader’s charisma and effectiveness
• Their general tendency to romanticise leadership, as a covariate

Inferred, not measured

• That delivery was especially important: the authors’ conclusion, stated in the abstract without figures we could check
• That the effects generalise to real leaders and audiences: not tested

References

1. Awamleh, R., & Gardner, W. L. (1999). Perceptions of leader charisma and effectiveness: the effects of vision content, delivery, and organizational performance. The Leadership Quarterly, 10(3), 345–373. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1048-9843(99)00022-3
2. Holladay, S. J., & Coombs, W. T. (1993). Communicating visions: an exploration of the role of delivery in the creation of leader charisma. Management Communication Quarterly, 6(4), 405–427. https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318993006004003
3. Holladay, S. J., & Coombs, W. T. (1994). Speaking of visions and visions being spoken: an exploration of the effects of content and delivery on perceptions of leader charisma. Management Communication Quarterly, 8(2), 165–189. https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318994008002002
4. Gardner, W. L. (2003). Perceptions of leader charisma, effectiveness, and integrity: effects of exemplification, delivery, and ethical reputation. Management Communication Quarterly, 16(4), 502–527. https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318903251324
5. Antonakis, J., Fenley, M., & Liechti, S. (2011). Can charisma be taught? Tests of two interventions. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 10(3), 374–396. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2010.0012