Voice Pitch and Leadership: Moderating Effects of CEO Accentedness and Follower Native Status

Abstract

We investigate whether vocal pitch of CEOs affects followers’ perception of leader trustworthiness and whether the foreign accentedness of the CEOs and the national origin of the followers moderate the relationship through an experimental study. While the negative relationship between vocal pitch and leadership qualities have been established in previous studies, most of the results were about native-born leaders and native-born followers. We explore whether what holds true for the traditionally typical native-born leadership and followership would also pattern with foreign-born leadership and followership. We conducted a forced-choice speech perception experiment with 12 native and foreign CEOs in US and native and foreign listeners in US. Importantly, the CEOs’ speech samples were acoustically altered so that there were three vocal pitch levels, LOW, MID, and HIGH. Overall, participants selected speech samples with lower voice pitch as more trustworthy-sounding leaders, replicating the findings in the previous studies. However, this tendency was moderated by the foreign accentedness of CEOs and the native status of listeners. That is, the negative relationship between voice pitch and leader trustworthiness was 1) weaker when the CEO was foreign-accented and 2) stronger when the listener was foreign-born. These findings expand our understanding on voice pitch perception and leadership trustworthiness in the context of leader-follower communication in the globalization era.