Female behaviour often unrecognized as leader behaviour
The same behaviours carried out by male and female leaders are perceived differently by followers and can influence how followers see themselves, says a U of T study that appears in the most recent issue of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
Management professor Kristyn Scott of the University of Toronto Scarborough and co-author Doug Brown of the University of Waterloo say people are not likely to see their female superiors as showing leadership if the women engage in more task-oriented, as opposed to communal, behaviour.
“We found that recognition of leadership behaviours thought of as communal -- like granting sick leaves, communicating openly and being honest -- did not depend on whether the leader was male or female,” says Scott. However, subjects had a harder time interpreting a woman’s “agentic” or task-oriented behaviour -- such as working late, fighting for resources or pushing a team to be Number 1 -- as showing leadership.
Subjects were presented with identical behaviours performed by men and women. Then they were given a psychological task that indicated how easily the respondent fit the behaviour into their own established ideas -- their prototype -- of leadership. When the agent of the behaviour was a woman, the respondents took longer to connect it with particular leadership qualities. Participants were also more likely to describe themselves as having leadership traits when exposed to a male task-oriented leader rather than a female.
“Our studies represent the first evidence that gender bias in leadership emerges very early on in our information processing. We also have the first evidence to show that this bias affects how people perceive themselves.”
The findings suggest the pervasive and unconscious nature of resistance to following female leaders. “Leadership is in the eye of the beholder. People observing the behaviour of their superiors will try to match that behaviour against their leader prototype,” says Scott. “The ongoing challenge for female leaders is to be perceived in the same way as male leaders.”