Chief executive officers' appearance predicts company performance, or does it? A replication study and extension focusing on CEO successions

In this article, we aim to replicate and extend a study that has revealed a link between naïve personality and leadership judgments and company profits. Rule and Ambady (2008) found that power- and leadership-related perceptions derived from CEOs' faces were significantly related to company profits. In our follow-up study and extension, we focus on CEO succession events to explore the longitudinal relationship between personality- and leadership-related perception ratings and company performance. We study the context of CEO successions to test whether variations in personality- and leadership-related perceptions from CEO faces are related to company performance and whether variations in company performance are associated with the type of CEO that is chosen. We can replicate the original correlative leadership effect using a temporal extension of the analysis horizon but fail to replicate the link between CEO leadership perceptions and company performance when using a different measure of performance and a different analytical approach to account for the longitudinal nature of our data. Our results have important implications for further theorizing on the relationship between subjective leadership perceptions and objective performance measures.