Leadership Research Summary:
- Worries about leadership (WAL) is a new construct tapping worries an individual may feel about possible negative consequences of accepting a leadership role. Three studies investigate how WAL is associated with men’s and women’s willingness for leadership and their perceived leadership potential rated by others. The first is a laboratory study on 328 participants, which shows that WAL is negatively associated with women’s willingness for leadership, while it is not related to that of men.
- The second study, which is a field study with multilevel-nested data from 429 employees and 101 supervisors, reveals that male subordinates are more likely to receive a favorable judgment of leadership potential by their supervisors when their WAL increases, while female subordinates’ WAL is irrelevant to this judgment.
- The final study, which is an experimental study on 122 supervisors, shows that supervisors view hypothetical male leadership candidates with high WAL as having higher warmth and lower competence (than those with low WAL), which both mediate the effect of WAL on judgments of their leadership potential made by the supervisors. Even though supervisors also view female candidates with high WAL as warmer, this does not evoke higher perceptions of leadership potential.
Leadership Research Findings:
- The present research extends existing leadership literature in several ways. First, the findings contribute to the literature on women’s underrepresentation in leadership. By using the novel construct of WAL, the present research addressed the role of agentic mechanisms to explain gender differences in leader emergence. Complementary to the meager literature on the agentic processes in leader emergence (e.g., Maurya and Agarwal, 2013; Elprana et al., 2015; Epitropaki, 2018), the present research found that women’s reluctance for leadership does not only come from being less motivated for leadership but also from perceived threat of leadership positions and accompanying emotion of worry about accepting such positions (Hoyt and Murphy, 2016; Alan et al., 2020).
- Second, the study’s findings contribute to the burgeoning attempts to expand the construct domain of leader emergence (cf., Hanna et al., 2021). Extant literature on leader emergence is relatively narrow in scope and focuses on who is “perceived as leader like” based on a person’s influence and dominance in informal group settings (Kaiser et al., 2008, p. 97).
- The current research addresses both opt-out and pushed-out processes (Kossek et al., 2017) operationalized as willingness for leadership and perceived leadership potential, respectively. Confirming the results of Aycan and Shelia (2019), researchers found evidence for the role of WAL in predicting both opt-out and pushed-out processes of leadership. As such, the research supports the notion that these two processes represent two intertwined, inseparable, and yet distinctive aspects of leader emergence.
- Following the example of the present research, the study calls for broadening the scope of contemporary and future leadership research to include possibilities of both self-selection and selection by others to formal leadership positions (cf. Aycan and Shelia, 2019) to provide comprehensive answers to the question of “how do leaders come about.”
- Third, the study’s findings have implications for the literature on stereotypes against women: (a) stereotype threat, and (b) stereotypical perception of women’s leadership potential. The finding that women with high WAL opt themselves out of leadership extends the stereotype threat literature in the domain of leadership (e.g., Hoyt and Murphy, 2016). WAL represents an anticipatory emotion that may be able to explain why situationally induced stereotype threat in a leadership context does not uniformly affect all women.
- Researchers found that women with low WAL may be less susceptible to stereotype threat effects and, consequently, less likely to opt themselves out of leadership than women with high WAL. However, low (compared to high) WAL did not provide an advantage for women’s perceived leadership potential; women were pushed out of leadership regardless of their WAL levels. Our findings suggest that stereotypes against women are so pervasive that positive attributes, including low WAL and high competence, did not benefit women in their perceived leadership potential.
- Finally, the study’s findings also contribute to the meager literature on stereotypes about men in the leadership context. It appears that: (1) high WAL signals warmth for men, and (2) perception of warmth benefits men in receiving positive judgment of leadership potential. These findings support the growing literature on the role of communal qualities and androgyneity in leader effectiveness for males (e.g., Laustsen and Bor, 2017).
- The findings imply that violating the stereotypical expectations (cf., EVT, Jussim et al., 1987) benefits men but not women in the context of WAL and leadership. In other words, men with high, compared to low, worries (which is against the stereotypical view of men in leadership, cf., Schein et al., 1996) received better ratings for their leadership potential, whereas women with low, compared to high, worries (which is against the stereotypical view of women, cf., Hoyt and Murphy, 2016) did not receive better ratings for their leadership potential.