Despite evidence that men are typically perceived as more appropriate and effective than women in leadership positions, a recent debate has emerged in the popular press and academic literature over the potential existence of a female leadership advantage. This meta-analysis addresses this debate by quantitatively summarizing gender differences in perceptions of leadership effectiveness across 99 independent samples from 95 studies. Results show that when all leadership contexts are considered, men and women do not differ in perceived leadership effectiveness. Yet, when other-ratings only are examined, women are rated as significantly more effective than men. In contrast, when self-ratings only are examined, men rate themselves as significantly more effective than women rate themselves. Additionally, this synthesis examines the influence of contextual moderators developed from role congruity theory (Eagly & Karau, 2002). Our findings help to extend role congruity theory by demonstrating how it can be supplemented based on other theories in the literature, as well as how the theory can be applied to both female and male leaders. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).

Entitativity, an individual’s recognition of a social unit as a group, is a fundamental group characteristic. However, past entitativity measures have not demonstrated their psychometric validity. We create and demonstrate initial psychometric validity for a new measure of entitativity as well as several of its antecedents. We demonstrate convergent and divergent validity of our entitativity measure (and the antecedents) in three studies of online and face-to-face groups in which people either observe a group or are members of a group. Results demonstrate that our measures of entitativity and its antecedents are robust across different group contexts. We also discuss the implications of the results of this research to advance entitativity theory.

In this article, we outline the evidence regarding the status effects of physical attractiveness, paying particular attention to outcomes in the areas of jobs, crime, performance evaluations, power, health perceptions, and exchange. The framework of status characteristics theory is used to guide our explication. The role of attractiveness in marketing is also discussed. While the literature generally supports the idea that attractiveness is good for people, we also consider evidence that beauty can be detrimental for some individuals in certain situations. Issues of race and gender are also considered as well as future research directions.

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