What Determines a Credible Leadership Signal? The Case of Signaling Intelligence for Gaining Social Influence
A leader is someone who influences followers toward reaching a shared goal. Studying leaders therefore implies studying what makes them influential. A rich literature explores the strategies that formal and informal leaders use to wield influence. The leadership process, however, involves at least two actors: an influencer and an influenced – a leader and a follower. Little is known about followers' responses to social influence and when they give up autonomy to follow a leader. When deciding whom to follow, followers often need to rely on informational signals to infer the unobservable leadership capability of a person. The difficulty for the follower is that not all information produced by the potential leader serves as a credible signal for their ability to successfully lead them toward a shared goal. Here we integrate signaling theory into the leadership process, conceptualizing leadership signals as a means for both leaders to gain social influence and followers to select competent leaders. Our paper makes two contributions. First, we offer a precise conceptualization and key conditions of credible leadership signals. Second, we present a methodological approach that allows us to estimate the causal effect of a potential leadership signal on followers’ tendency to follow leaders. That is, in a large and highly incentivized behavioral experiment (N=1400), we investigate the likelihood of people following someone who signals a higher level of intelligence.