Women in Leadership
Robin J. Ely
Refers to the exercise of leadership by women. Equal Employment Opportunity legislation together with the press for equality in the work place brought about by the Women’s Movement have likely provided the impetus for this relatively new area of inquiry in the field of leader ship. This work now constitutes one of the four main themes in contemporary leadership re search (Calas and Smircich, 1988). It has centered primarily on questions about whether or not men’s and women’s leadership styles and, to a lesser extent, leadership effectiveness are different in ways that are consistent with cultural stereotypes.
Leadership Style
In their meta analysis of the literature on gender and leadership style, Eagly and Johnson (1990) found evidence for both the presence and absence of leadership style differences between the sexes. There was no support in organizational studies and minimal support in laboratory studies for the gender stereotypic expectation that women lead in an interpersonally oriented style and men in a task oriented style. Consistent with stereotypic expectations, however, this analysis revealed overall that women tended to adopt a more democratic or participative style than men did. Researchers have typically offered either person centered explanations for sex difference findings, such as socialized differences in female and male personality or skills (Hennig and Jardim, 1977), or situation centered explanations, such as differences in the power and status of the organizational positions women and men hold (Kanter, 1977).
Although much of the sex difference research in the leadership field has been motivated by feminist interests in promising gender equity, recent critics have argued that assumptions underlying this work have served to reinforce bias against women. For example, implicit in much of this research is the concern that sex differences reflect or have been used to legitim ate the unequal treatment of men and women; therefore, an assumption underlying this work is that such differences should be repudiated and, in an ideal world, eradicated. Critics of this approach argue, however, that this assumption reinforces an asymmetric view of the role gender plays in leadership: it casts men’s leadership as generic leadership uninfluenced by masculine gender and male experience; as such, men’s leadership constitutes the presumed gender neutral norm against which women’s leadership is measured and evaluated. To the extent that women deviate from this norm their leadership is viewed as less effective or absent altogether. Hence, comparative studies of leadership have tended not only to devalue women but also in so doing to narrow our understanding of what might constitute the full range of effective leader behavior.
This criticism has led some feminist scholars to reconceive the meaning of leadership to include the relational and emotional competencies women have developed as leaders in the domes tic sphere of home and family, competencies, they argue, that men tend to lack (Helgesen, 1990). Hence, rather than seeking to overcome traditional feminine experience, these scholars exalt it, urging organizations to accommodate women in their feminized difference. In contrast to traditional research on women in leadership, much of this work rests on the assumption that neither organizations nor leadership are gender neutral; rather, gender bias permeates both organizations and organizational research in ways that devalue women and limit understanding. Evidence for the validity of this perspective has been largely descriptive, based on case studies of women’s experiences in organizations and on reinterpretations of previous sex difference findings (Helgesen, 1990; Rosener, 1990).
More recently, scholars whose work is grounded in poststructural feminism have offered yet another perspective on women and leadership style. This perspective represents a thoroughgoing break from the preoccupation with sex differences characteristic of previous research. Again, these scholars take issue with the unexamined assumptions underlying this work, arguing that the very focus on difference itself, regardless of whether and how it is recast and revalued, is both a source and a consequence of relations of domination. Juxtaposing the leadership literature with contemporaneous literature on sexuality and subjecting both to a cultural analysis called deconstruction, Calas and Smircich (1991) analyze leadership as a form of male homosocial seduction. As such, leadership promotes the values of masculinity in organizations, including masculine definitions of femininity. Hence, they argue, just as masculine identity and masculine experience have shaped the contours of discourse on leadership, so too have they shaped the contours of what we have come to believe are women’s essential qualities of nurturance and caretaking. According to a poststructural feminist perspective, theories of women’s leadership that attribute these (or any other) qualities, whether repudiated or exalted, to all women, are further oppressive because they elide racial, ethnic, class, and sexual identity differences among women and obfuscate forms of sexism to which different women are differentially subjected. They recommend abandoning general theories of either women or leadership in favor of partial and highly contextualized narratives to explore new meanings and new possibilities for the exercise of leadership by both women and men.
Leadership Effectiveness
Research on women’s leadership effectiveness has centered largely on the role of sex bias in both real and perceived effectiveness. A meta analysis of experimental research on sex bias in leader evaluations showed a small overall tendency for people to evaluate women leaders less favorably than men (Eagly, Makhijani, and Klonsky, 1992). Researchers have typically at tributed such findings to the cultural stereotypes people hold about men and women which put women at a relative disadvantage.
Research in organizational settings has tended to be more qualitative and theoretical, focusing primarily on structural determinants of leader effectiveness (Kanter, 1977). This work has suggested that where women leaders are situated in the organization’s power structure and the number of women who are in the organization’s senior ranks are key to understanding both how they are perceived and how well they will do in leadership positions. Because women tend to be in low power positions they are both less desirable and less effective as leaders; at the same time, their token status in many organizations heightens their visibility and creates increased performance pressures, isolation, and stereo typed roles for women leaders. Finally, there is some literature from a psychodynamic perspective that explores the unique difficulties women face in leadership roles, difficulties that stem from unconscious fantasies and fears of women’s power and the strongly held stereotype that women possess legitimate authority only to nurture (Bayes and Newton, 1978; Dumas, 1980). According to this perspective, these dynamics make it difficult for women leaders to mobilize resources in effective ways. Research in either laboratory or organizational settings that measures and compares men and women leaders’ effectiveness along specific dimensions is scant and inconclusive.
Bibliography
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Calas, M. B. and Smircich, L. (1991). Voicing seduction to silence leadership. Organization Studies, 12, 567 601.
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Eagly, A. H. and Johnson, B. T. (1990). Gender and leadership style: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 108, 233 56.
Eagly, A. H., Makhijani, M. G., and Klonsky, B. G. (1992). Gender and the evaluation of leaders: A metaanalysis. Psychological Bulletin, 111, 3 22.
Helgesen, S. (1990). The Female Advantage: Women’s Ways of Leadership. New York: Doubleday Currency.
Hennig, M. and Jardim, A. (1977). The Managerial Woman. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday.
Kanter, R. M. (1977). Men and Women of the Corporation. New York: Basic Books.
Rosener, J. (1990). Ways women lead. Harvard Business Review, November/December, 119 25.