Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
Female first, leader second? Gender bias in the encoding of leadership behavior☆
Section snippets
Leader categorization theory
Categorization theory posits that perceivers rely upon symbolic knowledge structures, called prototypes, to make sense of their environments (Rosch, 1978). Conceptually, prototypes are cognitive schemas that are stored in memory and that consist of the most representative features of a given category. As with other knowledge structures, prototypes assist perceivers to make sense of their surroundings (Weick, 1995) and generate adaptive behavioral responses (Johnson-Laird, 1989, Newell et al.,
Gender stereotypes, leader prototypes, and behavioral encoding
An extensive amount of literature has investigated sex trait stereotypes, which refer to the psychological characteristics or behavioral traits that are believed to characterize men with much greater (or lesser) frequency than they characterize women (Williams & Best, 1990). Unlike investigations of actual gender differences in psychological traits (e.g., Feingold, 1994), gender trait stereotypes refer to beliefs regarding the traits that are thought to characterize men and women. Stereotypical
The current research
The literature reviewed above leads us to propose that a leader’s gender can bias the manner in which leadership behaviors are encoded by observers. Because behavior is automatically encoded into traits during behavioral encoding, and behavioral encoding increases the accessibility of behavior implying traits during encoding (e.g., Uleman et al., 1996, Uleman, Newman et al., 1996, Wigboldus et al., 2003), in each of the studies reported below we assess encoding bias in terms of trait
Study 1
Considering the prior literature, it seems plausible that a target’s gender will influence the encoding of leadership behaviors into their underlying prototypical trait concepts. In this regard, the literature reviewed previously indicates that (a) behaviors are automatically encoded into relevant traits by perceivers (Van Overwalle et al., 1999, Wigboldus et al., 2003), (b) social category cues, such as gender, facilitate access to stereotype-consistent trait terms and inhibit access to
Participants
One hundred and thirty-nine undergraduate students from a large Canadian university participated in this study in exchange for extra credit towards their introductory psychology course grade. Fifty-eight percent of participants were female and the mean age was 19.57 (SD = 2.96).
Procedure
The study design was a 2 (leadership behavior: agentic vs. communal) × 2 (target gender: male vs. female) within-subjects design.
Results5
Prior to statistical analysis, the data were aggregated to give each participant a mean reaction time in each of the cells of the within subjects conditions (male target-agentic behavior, male target-communal behavior, female target-agentic behavior, female target-communal behavior). All incorrect responses were excluded from these means (e.g., indicating a nonword was presented when a word was actually presented), as were response times less than 150 ms and those greater than 2000 ms. This
Study 2a and Study 2b
The results of Study 1 suggest that perceivers may not encode agentic leadership behaviors into their underlying traits as strongly or as easily when they are presented with a female target. Specifically, our results demonstrated that although the encoding of communal traits may not vary as a function of leader gender, the encoding of agentic leadership behavior appeared to be dependent upon leader gender such that agentic leadership traits were less accessible when the leader was female (vs.
Participants and procedure
Forty-seven students from a large Canadian university were recruited to participate in Study 2a and 82 students were recruited to participate in Study 2b. All participants in Study 2a were recruited from the student center and received a candy bar in exchange for their participation, while all participants in Study 2b volunteered to complete the study as part of an in class exercise.
In both Study 2a and 2b, participants were randomly assigned to read about and form an impression of either a
Study 2a: Results
The data were analyzed using a one-way ANOVA, with the total number of agentic traits selected serving as the dependent variable. A significant difference was found between conditions, F (1, 45) = 5.09, p < .05, η2 = .10. An examination of the means (Mmaletarget = .64, SDmaletarget = .12; Mfemaletarget = .22, SDfemaletarget = .13) revealed that participants who had read and formed an impression of the male manager, on average, selected significantly more of the agentic traits as self-descriptive compared to
Study 2b: Results
As in Study 2a, the data were analyzed using a one-way ANOVA, with the total number of agentic leadership traits selected serving as the dependent variable. A significant difference was found between conditions, F (1, 80) = 4.50, p < .05, η2 = .053. An examination of the means (Mmaletarget = 1.30, SDmaletarget = .12; Mfemaletarget = .92, SDfemaletarget = .12) revealed that participants who had read and formed an impression of the male manager, on average, selected significantly more of the agentic leadership
Discussion
Bias against female leaders has received extensive attention both in the academic literature and the popular press. Although researchers have approached the study of gender bias in myriad ways, suggesting the bias may result from differing performance standards (e.g., Biernat & Kobrynowicz, 1997) or heuristic decision making (e.g., Martell, 1996), no prior research has examined whether gender bias emerges during encoding. In Study 1, we demonstrated that the extent to which agentic leadership
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This research was supported in part by a research grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada to Douglas J. Brown. This article is based, in part, on Kristyn A. Scott’s dissertation completed in the Psychology Department of the University of Waterloo. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 64th Annual Canadian Psychological Association, June, 2003 and the 19th Annual Conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, April, 2004. We would like to thank Cristina Mattison, Jeff Spence, Alyna Reesor, and Lance Ferris for their assistance with data collection, and Chris White for creating the computer programs used in these studies. In addition, we would like to thank Lisa Keeping, David Zweig, Samantha Montes, Pat Rowe, Ramona Bobocel, John Michela, Danny Heller, the editor, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on a previous version of this manuscript.