Eye Gaze and Visual Attention as a Window Into Leadership and Followership: A Review of Empirical Insights and Future Directions

Illuminating the nature of leadership, followership, and status asymmetries requires insights into not only how leaders and followers behave, but also the different cognitions that underpin these social relationships. We argue that the roots of leader and follower roles and relationships often lie in basic mental processes such as attention and visual perception. To understand not only how but also why leaders’ and followers’ behavioral patterns vary, we focus here on underpinning attentional processes that often drive rank-based behaviors. Methodologically, this focus on basic attentional and perceptual processes lessens a reliance on self-report and questionnaire-based data and expands our scientific understanding of actual, real-world leadership dynamics. Specifically, we review extant research on attention processes that reliably shape and reflect leader and follower relationships. This review brings together diverse empirical evidence from organization science, primatology, and social, developmental, and cognitive psychology on eye gaze, attention, and status in adults, children, and non-human primates. Together, this diverse literature reveals that leaders and followers differ in whether and how they receive, direct, and pay visual attention. Based on our review of the cross-disciplinary literature, we propose novel research questions and practical applications that this attention-based approach can generate for illuminating the puzzle of leadership and followership.