A Nonverbal Behavior Approach to Identify Emergent Leaders in Small Groups

Identifying emergent leaders in organizations is a key issue in organizational behavioral research, and a new problem in social computing. This paper presents an analysis on how an emergent leader is perceived in newly formed, small groups, and then tackles the task of automatically inferring emergent leaders, using a variety of communicative nonverbal cues extracted from audio and video channels. The inference task uses rule-based and collective classification approaches with the combination of acoustic and visual features extracted from a new small group corpus specifically collected to analyze the emergent leadership phenomenon. Our results show that the emergent leader is perceived by his/her peers as an active and dominant person; that visual information augments acoustic information; and that adding relational information to the nonverbal cues improves the inference of each participant´s leadership rankings in the group.