How does sleep relate to charismatic leadership?

Being a charismatic leader isn’t always simple. A charismatic leader must inspire, motivate, and convince followers to engage. In the workplace, charismatic leadership is a must. Leaders must show excitement and positivity about projects and convince employees that such projects are worthwhile.

A recent study entitled “Too Tired to Inspire or Be Inspired: Sleep Deprivation and Charismatic Leadership” in the Journal of Applied Psychology aimed to study how sleep influences charismatic leadership—from both the perspective of the leader and the follower. Barnes and colleagues (2016) first conducted an experiment in which they were able to manipulate the amount of sleep participants got on the night prior to the experiment. For the experiments, participants were asked to give a speech just as a leader would. Each speech was evaluated by a team of raters on charisma. Overall, leaders who had less sleep the night before were given lower charisma ratings. Individuals who received less sleep were perceived as less authentic in displaying their emotions.

The researchers also examined how lack of sleep affects followers (the raters) in their evaluation of leaders as charismatic. In this experiment, the researchers manipulated the amount of sleep the followers received the night before. The researchers found that followers who were sleep-deprived were less likely to rate their leaders as charismatic. The researchers attributed this relationship to the mood of the followers. Followers who had more sleep the previous night were in better moods. In contrast, the followers who had less sleep were in worse moods. Those in better moods are more likely to rate their leaders as charismatic.

This research has various implications in the workplace. Charismatic leadership is so important because it is associated with job satisfaction, job performance, organizational effectiveness, and retention. The researchers recommend improving corporate policies that could impact sleep. For example, organizations should foster healthy work-life balances by discouraging employees to answer company emails and phone call after hours.