Leadership Research Summary:
• It is a well-documented phenomenon that a group’s gender composition can impact group performance. Understanding why and how this phenomenon happens is a prominent puzzle in the literature. To shed light on this puzzle, we propose and experimentally test one novel theory: through the salience of gender stereotype, a group’s gender composition affects a person’s willingness to lead a group, thereby impacting the group’s overall performance.
• By randomly assigning people to groups with varying gender compositions, we find that women in mixed-gender groups are twice as likely as women in single-gender groups to suffer from the gender stereotype effect, by shying away from leadership in areas that are gender-incongruent. Further, we provide evidence that the gender stereotype effect persists even for women in single-gender groups. Importantly, however, researche3rs find that public feedback about a capable woman’s performance significantly increases her willingness to lead. This result holds even in male-stereotyped environments.
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
• The study’s findings have especially important implications for team formation in gendered industries (e.g., the tech sector) as compared to more traditionally gender-neutral industries (such as Media and Entertainment). Researhers find GSE to be exacerbated by the presence of even one person from the opposite gender; thus, women who work in gendered industries should be especially encouraged to avoid shying away from leadership opportunities, as doing so may result in their being overlooked for promotion or advancement opportunities.
• Furthermore, as numerous studies have shown, ambiguous performance metrics lead to biased performance evaluations, particularly for women performing male-typed tasks (see, e.g., Heilman et al., 2004, Heilman and Haynes, 2005). Biased evaluations may in turn lead to fewer women pursuing traditionally male roles, and particularly leadership roles. The reason is that the quality of leadership is difficult to measure, and women may in turn expect to receive disproportionately less credit for success and generally less favorable performance evaluations. However, the study suggests that public performance feedback may work to address this concern.
• Examples of approaches organizations might pursue include publicizing numbers of sales and corresponding revenues, the numbers of projects successfully completed, or even, in academics, the numbers and placements of papers published or grants awarded. It seems simple to implement such policies, and the results suggest that doing so may mitigate the GSE and help encourage the most capable women to choose to lead.
• The research findings have especially important implications for team formation in gendered industries (e.g., the tech sector) as compared to more traditionally gender-neutral industries (such as Media and Entertainment). Researchers find GSE to be exacerbated by the presence of even one person from the opposite gender; thus, women who work in gendered industries should be especially encouraged to avoid shying away from leadership opportunities, as doing so may result in their being overlooked for promotion or advancement opportunities.
• Furthermore, as numerous studies have shown, ambiguous performance metrics lead to biased performance evaluations, particularly for women performing male-typed tasks (see, e.g., Heilman et al., 2004, Heilman and Haynes, 2005). Biased evaluations may in turn lead to fewer women pursuing traditionally male roles, and particularly leadership roles. The reason is that the quality of leadership is difficult to measure, and women may in turn expect to receive disproportionately less credit for success and generally less favorable performance evaluations. However, our study suggests that public performance feedback may work to address this concern.
• Examples of approaches organizations might pursue include publicizing numbers of sales and corresponding revenues, the numbers of projects successfully completed, or even, in academics, the numbers and placements of papers published or grants awarded. It seems simple to implement such policies, and the research results suggest that doing so may mitigate the GSE and help encourage the most capable women to choose to lead.