Person Perception in Audience Decision Making 265decide a judge is harsh when comparing her to lenient judges and then mistakenly remember her
as very harsh when later comparing her to moderately harsh judges.
Audience Expectations About Professionals Playing Their Roles
Audiences may penalize professionals whose traits do not fi t their role schemata. A study of whole-
sale drug salespeople and retail pharmacist buyers demonstrates that buyer loyalty to a given supplier
is negatively related to the degree to which a salesperson’s actual behaviors differ from the buyer’s
role expectation of them.^43 Salespeople who are uncertain about the best way to fulfi ll their cus-
tomers’ role expectations suffer from what is called role ambiguity. The greater the salesperson’s role
ambiguity, the poorer their sales performance.^44
When audiences are asked to evaluate an individual’s leadership abilities, they automatically drawon their leader schemata.^45 Audiences make leadership judgments by activating a leader schema and
matching the attributes of the individual they are evaluating against the attributes in their leader
schema.^46 The better the match, the more favorable the audience’s leadership perceptions.^47
Audiences also perceive leaders who behave in ways that match their leader schemata to bemore effective than those whose behaviors do not match.^48 A manager who fails to conform to
her employees’ schemata for a good business leader will not be perceived as a leader in her organi-
zation.^49 In one leadership study, audience members watched videos of groups in which a target
person’s behavior varied on two dimensions: prototypicality of leadership behavior and frequency
of leadership behavior. Both dimensions signifi cantly affected the audience’s leadership ratings of
the target person.^50 Even more important to business professionals is the fi nding that managers who
fail to conform to their employees’ leader schemata tend to be less effective as managers.^51
Types of Role Schemata
Occupation Schemata: How Audiences Evaluate Professionals
Audiences have role schemata for all types of professionals: for managers, teachers, engineers, politi-
cians, as well as for those involved in other more specialized occupations.^52 For example, industry
analysts have a clear role schema for investor-relations representatives that is very different from
their role schema for senior managers.^53
As might be expected, recruiters have a highly differentiated and reliable understanding of thepersonality traits and emotional characteristics specifi c occupations require.^54 For example, recruit-
ers expect a good applicant for an advertising position to be thrill seeking, impulsive, changeable,
attention seeking, and fun loving. Conversely, they expect a good applicant for an accounting posi-
tion to be meek, defi niteness seeking, and orderly. And they expect applicants for supervisory and
coaching positions to be dominant, ambitious, aggressive, and persistent. Interestingly, recruiters’
expectations are a good match with applicants’ self-reported measures of personality and vocational
interests.^55
Leader Schemata: How Audiences Evaluate Leaders
Decision criteria in leader schemata are widely shared by people of all ages and backgrounds.^56
Even as early as fi rst grade, children can clearly differentiate leaders from nonleaders and can articu-
late the criteria they use to distinguish them.^57 Studies of group decision making also indicate there
is substantial agreement among group members about which member of the group is its leader and
which members are not.^58