Title

Women’s ways of leading: the environmental effect

School/Department

Cook School of Intercultural Studies

Publication Date

5-7-2019

Abstract

This paper aims to present a model describing how women enact executive leadership, taking into account gendered organizational patterns that may constrain women to perform leadership in context-specific ways.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper discusses gendered organizations, role congruity theory and organizational culture and work context. These strands of theory are interwoven to construct a model describing ways in which executive-level women are constrained to self-monitor based on context.

Findings

The pressure on women to conform to an organization’s executive leadership culture is enormous. Executive women in strongly male-normed executive leadership contexts must exercise strong gendered self-constraint to break through the glass ceiling. Women in strongly male-normed contexts using lessened gendered self-constraint may encounter a glass cliff. Women in gender-diverse-normed contexts may still operate using strong gendered self-constraint due to internalized gender scripts. Only in gender-diverse-normed contexts with lessened gendered-self-restraint can executive women operate from their authentic selves.

Practical implications

Organizational leaders should examine their leadership culture to determine levels of pressure on women to act with gendered self-constraint and to work toward creating change. Women may use the model to make strategic choices regarding whether or how much to self-monitor based on their career aspirations and life goals.

Originality/value

Little has been written on male-normed and gender-diverse-normed contexts as a marker for how executive-level women perform leadership. This paper offers a model describing how different contexts constrain women to behave in specific, gendered ways.

Keywords

Women executives; Glass ceiling (Employment discrimination)

Publication Title

Gender in Management

Volume

34

Issue

3

First Page

233

Last Page

250

DOI of Published Version

10.1108/GM-11-2017-0150

Link to Full Text

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