The Effects of Nonverbal Communication
on Credibility and Leadership Emergence
The old saying, "It's not what you say; it's how you say it," well represents the importance of nonverbal behaviors to the emergence of leadership and the establishment of credibility. Several nonverbal behaviors can greatly increase or decrease the opportunities for emergence of leadership and credibility. Studies have explored all aspects of the link between nonverbal communication and the establishment of leadership and credibility. Nonverbal factors fit into five categories: eye contact, gesticulations, paralanguage, posture, and overall facial expression. Also, environmental factors such as seating arrangement and setting have a great effect on leadership emergence and credibility. Use of this information can be important to a communicator because receivers interpret specific actions as having specific credibility and leadership meanings. This paper explores the nonverbal behaviors and environmental factors important to leadership and credibility establishment and the ones detrimental to it.
People's credibility is measured by the people with whom they are interacting. Credibility is the believability of a person as measured by another person. Although the output of credibility can be controlled by a communicator, the measure of credibility is still made by the receiver (Leathers, 1986). Thus, one's nonverbal communication is vital to the establishment of credibility. The receiver is taking in, consciously or unconsciously, all communication output and summing it up to measure credibility. Of all communication, nonverbal is the most important. Competence, trustworthiness, and dynamism are the three major components that make up credibility (Brembeck and Howell, 1976). Competence is the communicator's knowledge and expertise about the communication. Trustworthiness is the quality which shows the communicator's honesty and sinc...