A new psychology study provides evidence that anxious nonverbal behavior negatively affects interview performance ratings. The findings also suggest that competence plays a role in mediating the relationship between interview anxiety and performance ratings. The findings have been published in the Journal of Personnel Psychology.
The authors of the new study sought to better understand the relationship between interview anxiety and interview performance ratings, and its implications for the validity of employment interviews as a selection tool for predicting job performance. They wanted to determine whether interview anxiety causes interviewees to perform worse in interviews or if there are other factors involved, such as the qualifications of the interviewees.
The study aimed to disentangle the effect of nonverbal behavior from verbal responses to interview questions on interview performance ratings. Previous research had found that both verbal and nonverbal behaviors influence interview performance ratings, but the specific effect of nonverbal behavior was unclear. By manipulating the nonverbal behavior of interviewees while keeping verbal responses constant, the researchers could examine the specific impact of nonverbal behavior on interview performance ratings.
“We know from previous research that people who report being anxious during job interviews tend to receive lower interview performance ratings, but no one had really looked at why,” said study author Simonne Mastrella, a PhD student in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at the University of Guelph.
“There could be many reasons why anxious interviewees perform poorly. For example, anxious interviewees may have trouble putting together a good interview response. Or interviewers may notice the interviewee showing signs of anxiety and think negatively of the interviewee – this is what we looked at in our study.”
“We also know from other studies that anxious interviewees don’t tend to be worse job performers than their less anxious counterparts, so interview anxiety can be a wedge that interferes with people getting jobs that they are qualified for. This reason, combined with how common interview anxiety is, made this is an intriguing topic for us.”
To conduct the study, the researchers used a between-subjects experimental design. They recruited 823 participants with management experience to act as interviewers. The participants watched videos of simulated interviews and rated the interviewee’s performance for a specific position. The study manipulated anxious nonverbal behavior (high vs. low), the degree of interpersonal interaction in the target job (high vs. low), and interviewee gender (male vs. female).
The researchers created three video clips, each representing an interview question. The interviewee responses were created by interviewing three individuals with relevant work experience and combining their answers into a coherent response. The scripts and interviewee qualifications were the same for each condition.
Based on a literature review of anxiety cues, the researchers manipulated three nonverbal behaviors: eye contact, self-manipulation behavior (e.g., touching the neck), and limb movements. The high anxious nonverbal behavior condition involved more avoidance of eye contact, more self-manipulation behavior, and more leg movements compared to the low anxious nonverbal behavior condition.
Two job descriptions were used to manipulate the degree of interpersonal interaction in the target job. The job of consumer representative represented a high interpersonal interaction job, while the job of data clerk represented a low interpersonal interaction job.
Participants who observed high anxious nonverbal behavior in the interviewee gave lower ratings of interview performance compared to those who observed low anxious nonverbal behavior, suggesting that anxious nonverbal behavior negatively impacts interview performance ratings.
The researchers found that interview anxiety ratings directly predicted performance ratings and indirectly influenced them through competence ratings. However, interview anxiety ratings did not have an indirect effect through warmth ratings.
In other words, when people were perceived as more anxious, they were seen as less competent, which in turn affected their performance ratings. But anxiety did not have an indirect effect through warmth. This means that even though people might feel anxious during the interview, it didn’t necessarily impact how friendly or approachable they appeared to the interviewers.
“The main takeaway from our study is that showing visible signs of anxiety in a job interview – such as fidgeting – can hurt your interview score,” Mastrella told PsyPost. “We can conclude this because we ran an experiment where participants watched and rated video interviews where the interviewees (who were actors) gave the exact same responses but one had a lot of anxious body language, and the other had less.”
“The ‘anxious’ interviewee received a lower interview score of about 3.5 out of 5, compared to just over 4 out of 5 for the non-anxious interviewee. This may not seem like a big difference, but job interviews are competitive and even small differences can have implications for who gets hired!”
The participants in the study also responded to a short open-ended question regarding what influenced their ratings of interview performance.
The researchers found that participants in the high anxious nonverbal behavior condition mentioned anxiety-related words more frequently compared to those in the low anxious nonverbal behavior condition. This provides additional evidence that participants considered the anxious cues displayed by the interviewee when evaluating their interview performance. The presence of anxiety-related words in the responses was primarily influenced by the anxious nonverbal behavior condition and not by job type or interviewee gender.
“I don’t think our results were surprising, but maybe they were a bit disheartening,” Mastrella said. “If anxious interviewees score poorly in interviews because they cannot clearly communicate their qualifications, that is one thing. But with this study, it seems like even when they can do that, just looking anxious gets you penalized.”
Future research could examine what specific aspects of anxiety in an interview signal a lack of competence in the eyes of interviewers.
“Although we have evidence that these visible signs of anxiety can negatively impact interview performance scores, we’re not sure exactly what interviewers are thinking about these interviewees that are causing them to give lower scores,” Mastrella said. “We know from our study that they are also rated as less competent, but we do not know what it is about being anxious in an interview that signals a lack of competence for a job.”
The study, “The Impact of Interviewees’ Anxious Nonverbal Behavior on Interview Performance Ratings“, was authored by Simonne J. Mastrella, Deborah M. Powell, Silvia Bonaccio, and C. Meghan McMurtry.
