Discriminating Individually Considerate and Authoritarian Leaders by Speech Activity Cues

Effective leadership can increase team performance, however up to now the influence of specific micro-level behavioral patterns on team performance is unclear. At the same time, current behavior observation methods in social psychology mostly rely on manual video annotations that impede research. In our work, we follow a sensor-based approach to automatically extract speech activity cues to discriminate individualized considerate from authoritarian leadership. On a subset of 35 selected group discussions lead by leaders of different styles, we predict leadership style with 75.5% accuracy using logistic regression. We find that leadership style predictability is dependent on the relative discussion time and is highest for the middle parts of the discussions. Analysis of regression coefficients suggests that individually considerate leaders start speaking more often while others speak, use short utterances more often, change their speech loudness more and speak less than authoritarian leaders.