DO THEY SEE WHAT THEY WANT TO SEE? AN OBSERVER-ORIENTED APPROACH TO THE FEMALE LEADERSHIP (DIS)ADVANTAGE
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Oh, Soojin
- Graduate Program:
- Business Administration
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 30, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Vilmos Misangyi, Major Field Member
Alicia Grandey, Outside Unit & Field Member
Brent Ambrose, Program Head/Chair
Stephen Humphrey, Major Field Member
Aparna Joshi, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Carolyn Dang, Major Field Member - Keywords:
- Gender
Leadership
Stereotype
Motivated Cognition - Abstract:
- Research has documented gender biases against female leaders, but recent evidence suggests that these biases may not be consistent and that there may even exist a female leadership advantage in some settings. To add clarity to the literature, I challenge the notion that a leader’s behaviors will be consistently perceived as female- or male-typed, resulting in either penalties or rewards. Instead, I adopt an observer-oriented approach to examine factors that contribute to variation in the application of gender biases among observers. Drawing from motivated cognition theory, this dissertation argues that observer motives significantly influence their interpretation of leader behaviors and leadership evaluations. The dissertation consists of two essays that examine how observers assess female leaders’ displays of both male-typed and female-typed attributes. The first essay examines the effects of women’s assertiveness – a male-typed attribute - on leader evaluations in the entrepreneurial venture context. This essay investigates how entrepreneurial gatekeepers’ mindsets, specifically their economic and impartiality mindsets, influence these evaluations. The second essay focuses on optimism, an understudied but valued female-typed attribute, and also explores how observers’ power mindset affects the evaluation of leader optimism. By integrating research on optimism and goal-based stereotyping, this essay posits that optimism is stereotypically perceived as female-typed but could be evaluated differently based on the observers’ formal position-induced power mindsets. Overall, this dissertation contributes to gender research by examining how the varied motives and mindsets of observers shape the application of gender bias in leader evaluations.