Gender and leadership: Introduction to the special issue

This article presents results from two complementary experiments that examine the effects of a potential obstacle to female leadership: gendered language in the form of masculine leadership titles. In the first experiment (N = 1753), we utilize an unobtrusive writing task to find that a masculine title (“Chairman” vs. “Chair”) increases assumptions that a hypothetical leader is a man, even when the leader’s gender is left unspecified. In the second experiment (N = 1000), we use a surprise recall task and a treatment that unambiguously communicates the leader’s gender to find that a masculine title increases the accuracy of leader recollection only when the leader is a man. In both studies, we find no significant differences by gender of respondents in the effects of masculine language on reinforcing the link between masculinity and leadership. Thus, implicitly sexist language as codified in masculine titles can reinforce stereotypes that tie masculinity to leadership and consequently, weaken the connection between women and leadership.

Leadership as a social influence process has always involved a complex set of phenomena that demands an interdisciplinary lens. Leadership scholarship has now entered into a digital era. In a digital era, the overall phenomenon is changing, as are the tools through which we study it, demanding a new “lens” through which we view leadership. Yet, this raises the question, to what extent is leadership different in a digital era? In acknowledgement of this trend, a special issue was commissioned at The Leadership Quarterly that sought to stimulate the imagination of leadership scholars and practitioners. In the current work, we begin with a brief review of who, what, when, where and why of digital leadership. We cover leadership in informal contexts (e.g., social media), generalization from face-to-face to virtual contexts, computational modeling, the leveraging of technology (e.g., machine learning; Big Data), as well methodological how-to guides. We then plot a path forward for leadership scholars in the dawn of the digital era.

Gender stereotyping has brought enormous challenges to organizational human resource management, and scholars and practitioners have devoted efforts to weaken or even eliminate the negative effects of masculine stereotypes on female workers. However, feminine stereotypes are not well understood, and the opportunity for femininity as a leadership trait in certain fields begs further empirical examination. For that reason, this study breaks down the single gender-leadership stereotype of masculinity, extending the gender-emotion stereotype of femininity to explore androgynous cues for employees’ perceived emotional leadership (PEL) in hospitality. By conducting three studies—two Implicit Association Tests with 124 participants and a study with 466 participants—we verified the effect of gender stereotypes on hospitality leadership traits and emotional traits. The findings show that employees with different ideal gender roles of leadership (IGRL) have different degrees of PEL and employees with androgynous IGRL have higher PEL. Overall, this study suggests the necessity of androgynous leadership role and androgynous management styles in hospitality workplaces.

Our understanding of the link between women managers and firm-level innovation remains incomplete. Building on recent research on gender and leadership styles, we argue that there is a positive association between women managers and firm innovation. We highlight the selection process of women managers as an important underlying mechanism and discuss institutional and environmental contingencies as factors that influence this association. Specifically, we theorize and garner empirical support for the idea that in countries with legislation that promotes legally-mandated gender quotas, underqualified women may be selected for management positions, whereas in countries with voluntary gender quotas (or quotas are entirely absent), women are predominantly selected on the basis of their qualifications. The association between women and innovation is strengthened (weakened) in the latter (former) case. We also argue that this positive relationship is stronger under conditions of environmental complexity, which typically characterize innovation activities. These predictions are supported on the basis of data from the Management, Organization and Innovation (MOI) survey which covers manufacturing firms in twelve countries.

The role congruity theory and research on gender stereotypes suggest that communion and agency tendencies explain gender discrimination in performance evaluations. We propose that high agreeableness, a Big Five personality trait, captures the communal dimension of an individual’s concern for others. Across two studies conducted in India and the United States, we found evidence that the relationship between agreeableness and performance evaluations is nonlinear for female employees. Women are rated as high performers when they exhibit moderate levels of agreeableness. For male employees, we find a communal bonus effect in which they benefit from being agreeable in the workplace. Our findings demonstrate the stability of these findings across Indian and North American cultures. Our findings contribute to the literature on role congruity, personality theories, and job performance.

In this study, we draw from 22 years of research in leadership to investigate the ambiguous relationship between the personality trait agreeableness and leadership. First, we conduct a comprehensive review of the leadership literature to build a foundational understanding of leader agreeableness that includes providing a broad definition for agreeableness, identifying emerging trends, and proposing an agenda for future research. Second, using the literature review as our theoretical foundation, we conduct a meta-analysis from the same body of literature to quantitatively decompose the relationship between leader agreeableness and leadership emergence and effectiveness. We also hypothesize and test the contextual moderating effects for gender, leadership level, and cultural context (as reflected by individualism-collectivism). Collectively, our findings provide a framework for future research on leadership agreeableness and support the notion that nice (highly agreeable) leaders can emerge as effective leaders.