About This Project

Charisma generally involves leaders displaying positive mood and transferring that mood from themselves to subordinates. However, leaders are often sleep deprived, and sleep has clear effects on mood and interpersonal interaction. My objective is to study the effect of sleep on charisma in leadership.

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What is the context of this research?

Sleep is a topic that has historically been absent from the management research literature. Indeed, many business believe that they are relatively immune to the effects of lost sleep. However, leaders are governed by the same physiological processes as everyone else, and when they suffer negative effects, these can have broad implications for their subordinates.

My research shows that sleep has important effects on mood, attitudes, and behavior. When people are short on sleep, they are more irritable, have lower job satisfaction, help each other less, cyberloaf more, engage in more unethical behavior, have lower engagement in their work tasks, and have less self-control.

Now I am extending this line of research to focus more specifically on leaders, beginning with leader charisma.

What is the significance of this project?

My research brings sleep into the topic of management. In this project, I focus specifically on leaders, and how their sleep influences the leadership process. By understanding how this works, we as a field can begin to develop interventions targeted at improving leadership. With better leadership, both the well-being and performance of employees will improve.

What are the goals of the project?

With this funding, I will conduct a laboratory experiment. This will involve a control condition (normal sleep) and an experimental condition (sleep disruption every hour on the hour thoughout the night), with half of the participants assigned to each group. Participants will then read two speeches, one that they prepare and one that is prepared for them. These speeches will be recorded, and then coded afterward for charisma.

The second part of the study will involve a field study in which I measure naturally occuring sleep and charisma of leaders, as well as the effects of leader sleep and charisma on follower outcomes at work. Pairing a laboratory experiment with a field study will allow me to capitalize on the complimentary strengths of these different methods of conducting research.

Budget

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This project involves sleep depriving participants. In order to obtain participants, I'll need to provide a small cash incentive to participate. Moreover, this study requires a few cameras to record the speeches of the participants.

All other expenses (laboratory space, laboratory computers, undergrad research assistants, a PhD student to help conduct the studies) are covered by the University of Washington.

Meet the Team

Christopher Barnes

Team Bio

I am an assistant professor of management in the Foster School of Business in the University of Washington. After working in the Fatigue Countermeasures branch of the Air Force Research Laboratory, I pursued my Ph.D. in organizational behavior at Michigan State University.

My primary research interest is sleep as it relates to workplace antecedents and outcomes. My research on sleep has been published in top management and applied psychology outlets such as the Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. I also serve on the editorial boards of these journals. My research on sleep has received coverage from many popular press outlets, including the the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, ABC News, MSNBC News, and The Huffington Post. Follow me on Twitter: @chris24barnes

Christopher Barnes

I am an assistant professor of management in the Foster School of Business in the University of Washington. After working in the Fatigue Countermeasures branch of the Air Force Research Laboratory, I pursued my Ph.D. in organizational behavior at Michigan State University. My primary research interest is sleep as it relates to workplace antecedents and outcomes. My research on sleep has been published in top management and applied psychology outlets such as the Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. I also serve on the editorial boards of these journals. My research on sleep has received coverage from many popular press outlets, including the the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, ABC News, MSNBC News, and The Huffington Post. Follow me on Twitter: @chris24barnes