Concepto y tipología

In addition to leadership characteristics and perceived relationship with the leader, employee gender and gender role identity might also matter in predicting change in implicit attitudes toward female leadership. It is essential to examine the malleability of implicit attitudes toward female leadership for male versus female groups. Men’s versus women’s higher stereotypic/prejudicial attitude and potential resistance toward interventions on implicit attitudes toward female leadership are very critical issues for policy makers and for leadership literature (Koenig et al., 2011). Most decision makers who promote (or mostly prefer not to promote) women in leadership positions are men. Any empirical evidence for or against the malleability of their implicit attitudes toward female leadership can inform us about potential decision makers’ implicit evaluations about women managers at work.

Despite of such importance of gender differences, gender difference on attitudes toward women’s leadership is not theoretically clear. Some studies reveal no gender differences on attitudes toward female leadership. For example, Heilman and Haynes (2005) reported that both males and females tended to devalue the leadership roles and competence of female team members at similar rates. Similarly, Joshi (2014) illustrated that male and female project members did not differ in terms of devaluing women authority experts in groups. In another example, although Beaman and colleagues (2009) reported gender difference in implicit prejudice, they found decreases in male as well as female Indian voters’ explicit bias (i.e., perceived leader effectiveness) and implicit bias (i.e., gender-leadership occupation associations) against female political leadership after two year exposure to a female leader.

On the other hand, some views suggest men are more stereotypical/prejudicial attitudes against female leadership (e.g., Beaman et al., 2009; Duehr & Bono, 2006; Eagly, Makhijani & Klonsky, 1992; Koenig et al., 2011). This is explained by higher rates of sexist attitudes (e.g., “women are weak”, women are not clever”) among men compared to women (Glick & Fiske, 1996) as well as their perceived threat to status (Rudman et al., 2012). Men are more likely to have sexist attitudes and therefore are less likely to prefer or like women leaders. Moreover, a woman leader who occupies traditionally male dominated position might be threatening for the masculine identity of

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males (e.g., Joshi, 2014). In a traditionally male dominated position, a woman leader might challenge men’s status expectations. According to status incongruity argument (Rudman et al., 2012), women’s positioning in high status – i.e., leadership- may breach norms of social status, resulting in backlash effect. Working under the authority of a female might threaten their status and identity (manhood) for men, resulting in men’s higher prejudice (e.g., disliking) of women in authority positions. In contrast, women might experience higher positive attitudes toward female leadership compared to men, because they favor same sex leader. This pertains to similarity attraction hypothesis, which suggests positive evaluations and liking of others that are similar to one.

Past studies, indeed, support the stereotypic/prejudicial inclinations of men against women’s leadership. For example, one study demonstrates that men are quicker to pair authority roles with male names, while subordinate roles with female names compared to women (Rudman & Kilanski, 2000). This implies males’ higher implicit stereotyping toward female authority figures, compared to women. Similarly, men are also found as more resistant to change in stereotypic/prejudicial attitude toward women’s leadership, whereas women often have higher automatic biases in favor of their in-group (women group) (e.g., Rudman & Goodwin, 2004). Studies reported that counter-stereotyping manipulations (e.g., imagining a counter-stereotypical female figure) can significantly reduce implicit biases of female participants against women leaders, but this is not found for men (e.g., Blair et al., 2001). In the longitudinal field experiment of Beaman and colleagues (2009), male Indian villagers report no change while female citizens had lower within person levels in their implicit prejudice against female leaders.

Contradictory findings highlight a need for closer examination of implicit attitudes toward female leadership from the perspective of follower gender. I predict that such conflicting findings can be resolved by considering gender identity. I define gender identity as one’s perception of self through gender roles (Bem, 1974). Accordingly, an individual can encode and organize information about self in terms of culturally defined roles of males and females. This reflects sex typing in the definition of self: a high identifier female perceives self as feminine, whereas high identifier male as masculine. In their meta-analysis, Lenton and colleagues (2009) report that interventions on the automatic stereotyping toward women might not always change the cognitions of

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females who are identified with their gender roles, resulting in lack of gender differences on implicit gender stereotyping.

The higher identification with gender roles increases the saliency of stereotypic gender norms (Bem, 1974; Wood & Eagly, 2015). The saliency of gender norms and cues can lead people to attend gender while evaluating female leaders. This can potentially lead people to perceive higher breach of prescriptive gender norms (Heilman, 2001). The perceived breach of prescriptive gender norms can result in higher prejudice against women leaders as claimed by backlash effect (Rudman & Glick, 1999; 2001) and role congruity theory (Eagly & Karau, 2002). Joshi (2014) also conveyed this argument. In her study, high gender-identifying men and women project members devalued the expertise of female experts in teams. Joshi (2014) explained this result in terms of higher saliency argument and perceived breach in prescriptive gender norms.

Taken together, I posit that gender identity of male and female followers might influence context dependent changes in implicit stereotyping as well as change in generalized implicit prejudice against female leaders. High gender identity might increase the salience of gender cues during the evaluation of female leadership. Increased salience of female leader gender can potentially increase the perceived incongruence between female gender roles and leadership roles. I predict that higher gender identifiers tend to show the lower within person changes in generalized implicit prejudice toward female leadership compared to low identifiers.

Hypothesis 7a: The association between female mayor exposure and the context dependent automatic association between female and leadership (Phase 2, controlling for Phase 1) will be lower for high gender identifier employees compared to low identifiers.

Increased saliency of gender roles might lead to higher likelihood of breach in prescriptive gender norms, leading to backlash effect. In a longer-term exposure, a female authority figure might be seen as threatening the status expectations and male’s manhood. All these forces may act against change in generalized implicit prejudicial attitudes toward female leadership for high identifier respondents after exposure to a female mayor.

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Hypothesis 7b: The association between exposure and the within person variation in generalized implicit prejudicial attitudes toward female leadership will be lower for high gender identifiers compared to low gender identifier employees.

I will also explore the role of participant gender in relation with their gender identity. I will also explore the moderating role of participant gender in previously proposed mechanisms of change in implicit stereotyping and implicit prejudice toward female leadership.

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METHODS

This section describes and discusses the methodology of the dissertation research. In order to test the proposed hypotheses, I conducted a three-wave longitudinal field study with three-month intervals. The previous section already discussed the rationale of the research context and time intervals in the longitudinal design. The current methodology section, first, describes the sampling procedure and the characteristics of the participants. Second, it presents the measures and the instruments. I specifically present the methodological and psychometric issues regarding implicit association tests (IATs) in detail. Then, I outline the data collection procedure, and the data analytical plans.