BUSINESS PSYCHOLOGYtime they’d been in a position of power, and to think about a time they’d
felt incompetent, then went on to choose a particularly loud noise for
students to be blasted by when answering incorrectly in a hypothetical
quiz (this was used as a laboratory measure of aggressiveness).
Rather than listing those character traits that make an ideal leader,
an alternative view of leadership was provided by Stephen Reicher
and colleagues in 2007. They said that the most important thing is for
followers or employees to identify with their leader, to feel that he or she
is one of them. George W. Bush’s cowboy hat and Yasser Arafat’s head-
scarf are both examples of leaders attempting to show their followers
that they are just like them. Similarly, Reicher argued that effective
leaders foster a sense of shared identity among their followers, trans-
forming a disconnected crowd into a cohesive group. Consider how
President Obama was careful to repeat “Yes WE can”, not “Yes I can” in
his campaign to become president.
On a less serious note, it seems that would-be leaders are more likely
to succeed if they have hair and are tall. The United States hasn’t had a
bald President since Dwight D. Eisenhower, and in the UK, the only two
Conservative party leaders since the early 1920s to have failed to become
Prime Minister, William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith, were both bald.
Regarding height, in 2004 Timothy Judge and Daniel Cable reviewed the
results from 45 studies containing relevant data and found that taller
people, especially if male, were more likely to find their way into leader-
ship roles and to earn bigger salaries.