What can 50 years of leadership communication research tell us?

Summary -  Over the past 50 years, research into the verbal and nonverbal communication used by leaders in all walks of business and society, has helped us to better understand the dynamics of leadership; it has enriched the study of leadership theory, and revealed best practices and strategies for more effective communication in the workplace. This timely review of past research organizes what has been learned in this field of study to date under four broad categories: content; leadership attributes; context; and outcomes. In this article the authors share key insights and applications drawn from each category—offering a foundation for leaders, practitioners, and researchers to build upon, as they seek to find innovative solutions to today’s leadership challenges.

From Demosthenes, through Abraham Lincoln and from Winston Churchill to Martin Luther King, great political leaders have relied on powerful communication to express strategy and motivate followers to get things done. Today, leadership communication has evolved—from the quietly moving style of President Volodymyr Zelensky, to the open and accessible Sheryl Sandberg, and the authenticity and humor of Michelle Obama—excellence in leadership communication can take many forms. With modes and channels of communication becoming more digital and remote, styles and strategies are evolving once again.

Some things are as true today as throughout history: one of the most important things leaders do is to communicate; better communicators tend to make better leaders; and there are many tools, tactics, and techniques at our disposal to help become a great communicator.

Clues and connections

Leader communication has always been a key leader behavior studied by scholars of leadership. However, many of the field’s conclusions about successful features of leader communication stem primarily from survey data, which may be subject to biases or circumscribe the analysis to backward looking events. As modern leadership challenges become more complex and as we move firmly into the era of digital communication we can use more advanced analytical tools and artificial intelligence to derive insights from actual leader communication events and real-time exchanges with stakeholders, rather than solely relying on surveying leaders and their followers.

Over the five decades a wide-ranging body of work has been accumulated on leader communication that analyzes actual leader communication behaviors as exhibited in text, speeches, social media, and laboratory experiments that simulate real leader communication. However, this work occurs across multiple, parallel streams of research—with little cross-pollination or connectivity between those streams. This makes finding a holistic view of leadership communication and its implications for leadership responses and behavior elusive.

A new study from Johns Hopkins professor Cassandra Chambers, a Core Faculty member of the Center for Innovative Leadership, marks an important step in the field of leadership communication. The study, which Chambers co-authored with Evita Huai-Ching Liu (Bocconi University) and Celia Moore (Imperial College Business School), provides a comprehensive review of the research to date, building connections between disparate streams, and mining out new insights. This connective tissue across such a large data set allows new analyses and insights around leadership traits and characteristics; the topics leaders talk about and the rhetorical tools they use; how leader communication is affected by other factors; and how it affects leaders themselves, their followers, stakeholders, and organizations.

The four categories of leadership communication research

To achieve this objective the authors organized the research into four broad categories:

1. Content and delivery

The research reviewed in this category confirms that simply detailing what captures leaders’ attention and the linguistic strategies they use to achieve certain goals are in themselves interesting. For example, researchers were able to extract common topics that leaders discuss when running for office and communicating about the challenges they face—using modeling techniques to parse large sets of text data. Other research explored the rhetoric employed by leaders to accomplish specific goals, such as the linguistic strategies used in the case of CEOs who shirked responsibility for the banking crisis.

2. Leadership attributes

This category considers how a leader’s characteristics and attributes can be revealed though the way he or she communicates and the messages they impart. Characteristics such as:

Charisma
The research shows how charismatic leaders communicate their vision using stories and metaphors, convey optimism, emphasize collective history, and identify with and reference their followers’ worth. Charismatic U.S. presidents used nearly twice as many metaphors as non-charismatic presidents—reinforcing the critical role that metaphors play in inspiring followers. Nonverbal forms of communication, including vocal delivery, eye-gazing patterns, and style of dress, also influence perceptions of charisma.

Narcissism
Narcissism and hubris have been measured using unobtrusive data sources—e.g., photos of vain CEOs in company reports, excessive use of first-person singular pronouns versus first-person plural in interviews—thus tracking leaders’ micro-level traits that are usually inaccessible through other research methods. (Hopefully, exposure to such research may bring self-awareness.)

Morality
Research in this area demonstrates how a leader’s verbal communication can reveal aspects of their morality and how they exercise this in the workplace. This has contributed to a better understanding and definition of ethical leadership and of humility in leadership.

Individual characteristics
Communication can expose several other leadership traits and characteristics. For example, political leaders’ press conferences have been analyzed to deduce their pessimism, femininity, beliefs, motives, decision styles and interpersonal styles. Understanding these underlying psychological drivers can help explain leaders’ strategic decisions and choices.

Focus of attention
A study of leaders’ communication can indicate the issues they are paying most attention to, or may be preoccupied with. From this it is possible to infer how they are making sense of their competitive environment—if they are more focused on internal challenges or on external threats and opportunities, and if they talk positively of ‘gain’ and ‘growth’ or defensively of ‘stability’.

3. Context

This category covers the situational context from which a leader communicates, and how this influences the messages they convey. Research looks at how a leader’s political positions or social standing increases or decreases the cognitive or linguistic sophistication of communication. It also explores other leaders’ communication changes as a result of contextual factors including political affiliations and policy stances, adopting a leadership position and assuming power, and dealing with a crisis such as a terrorist attack, the pandemic, and military conflict.

This body of work demonstrates that what leaders communicate about and how they communicate it is conditional on the position they hold, affiliations they have, positions they maintain, and circumstances they are in. It emphasizes that communication is not stable, but adapts to the context, the purposes and audiences it serves, as well as the position in which the leader finds him or herself.

4. Outcomes

The final category focuses on the outcome of leader communications, as classified by how they impact leaders themselves, their followers and stakeholders, as well as more macro level outcomes such as organizational and national cultures.

Leader level
A leader’s communication generates a wide range of outcomes for the individual. As well as whether their communication elicits positive attitudes towards themselves, outcomes can include whether they are perceived as effective in their role, and if they are selected for more senior roles in future.

Follower level
The way leaders communicate and what messages they send impacts their followers’ performance in many ways. Motivation, mood, ethical behavior, confidence in ability to do the job, can all be influenced, as can intentions to whole-heartedly support the organization.

Stakeholder responses
Stakeholders—from customers to investors—have become increasingly relevant and active in their responses to leadership communication, especially in the age of social media. Their reactions—positive or negative—have also become increasingly more measurable.

Macro level outcomes
The communication behaviors and messages from senior corporate leaders’ give powerful signals that influence strategic decisions, organizational culture, and operational performance. A small set of recent studies have investigated how politicians’ linguistic signals affect performance at the state or national level, and recent research has also provided empirical evidence that national political leaders’ communication was associated with their countries’ COVID-19’s infection and death rates.

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Through collating, reviewing and connecting relevant past research into leadership communication that focuses on actual leader communication events instead of questionnaires, the authors highlight that understanding the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of leader communication is key to understanding the impact and effectiveness of leader communication. The study also points to the many ways in which researchers can use leader communication to measure the attributes of leadership more unobtrusively, objectively, and systematically.

As the scope and remit of a leader grows broader and more complex—with emerging needs to lead followers through uncertainty; to lead inclusively; to lead diverse and remote teams; to overcome biases; to coach, persuade, and influence numerous stakeholders—it is vital to take stock of the state of the art, the analytical tools and contemporary insight in this field, in order to form new and innovative strategies and techniques—both verbal and non-verbal—for better, more effective leadership communication.

The Center for Innovative Leadership (CIL) at the Carey Business School aims to advance knowledge and build capacity for innovative leadership in modern organizations. CIL is a hub for new ideas and insights on leadership, combining faculty-led research, student-facing programming, and community-focused impact.