Diversity and leadership

Gender/ social roles

Consensual belief, within one culture, about the roles of men and women.

Descriptive expectations/ lack of fit/ role incongruity

Beliefs of women stereotypical characteristics are incongruent with people’s representation of typical or ideal leaders (ILT’s).

Prescriptive expectations (what should be/ norms)

Women will not be evaluated favorably if they act in a masculine way because they violate expectations regarding their normative/prescribed behavior.

Double standards

Female leaders must demonstrate exceptional competence to be seen as equal in ability to men and must also avoid threatening ohters with their competence and lack of warmth.

Business case argument

Women’s presence on boards improves companies’ bottom line, so companies should appoint women to corporate boards.

• no empirical evidence

Glass ceiling

The invisible barrier that prevents women and other minorities from climbing the corporate ladder and reaching leadership positions. Regardless of their qualifications.

Glass cliff

How women and minorities are more likely to be placed in formal leadership positions when firms perform poorly and so, when the leadership position is riskier and at greater risk of failure.

• no evidence supporting it

Glass escalator effect

Cases whereby men are promoted quickly into hierarchical positions in gender-incongruent occupations (women-dominated industries).

Flawed attributions

Female leaders are being consistently undervalued and viewed as less competent, less effective and less leader-like compared with their male counterparts.

• Unless objective individual perfomance feedback is given.

Queen bee phenomenon

Women leaders assimilate into male-dominated organizations by distancing themselves from junior women and legitimizing gender inequality in their organization.

• Evidence shows the opposite is true

Female leadership advantage

Belief that women are more likely than men to adopt collaborative and empowering leadership styles, while men are disadvantaged because their leadership styles include more command-and-control behaviors and the assertion of power.

Token member

A solo representative of a particular social category.

• Tokens have a strong perceived lack of fit

Affirmative action policies (AAPs)

The practice of advantaging members of target groups over equally qualified majority group candidates or in most extreme cases over more qualified group members, in hiring and promoting positions.

Managerial interventions to create more gender-fair organizations

• Change long hour norm

• Powerful sponsors that support women leaders

• A critical mass of women in executive positions (against tokenism)

• Prepare women for management

• Give people with significant parental responsibilities more time to prove themselves

• Promote more women role models

HR interventions to create more gender-fair organizations

• Increase people’s awareness around prejudice (diversity training)

• Flexible work policies

• Reduce the subjectivity of performance evaluations

• Use open-recruitment tools

• Establish family-friendly and egalitarian HR practices

• Welcome women back

• Provide childcare offers

Surface level diversity

Observable difference between people such as age, gender, sex, skin color, …

Deep level diversity

Non-observable differences between people they are more important and have more effect on team performance (like task-related diversit)

Task-related diversity

• Diversity in experience

• Diversity in education

• Diversity in expertise