OB Brownbag - Laetitia Renier, HEC Lausanne

Does charisma matter in social media settings? Research suggest that charismatic signaling used by informal distant leaders has a positive effect on their social influence. Accordingly, Tur and colleagues (2021) provided empirical evidence regarding the effect of verbal charisma on social influence (number of views) and adjectives related to leadership (i.e., inspiring and persuasive) using field data. We report a conceptual replication of their first study where we used machine learning based coding (automatic coding) - instead of manual coding - of verbal charismatic signaling and talk based material to control for static attractiveness, on a larger dataset (768 TED talk videos). Our results replicate previous findings: Verbal charismatic signaling has a positive effect on social influence and perception of leadership beyond nonverbal charismatic signaling and static attractiveness. We discuss the added value of using automatic coding of charismatic signaling as a beneficial alternative to human coding.