Black and minority ethnic (BME) employees appear to experience more difficulty reaching senior leadership positions than do their white counterparts. Using Eagly and Carli's metaphor of the labyrinth, our aim was to give voice to black and minority ethnic managers who have successfully achieved senior management roles, and compare their leadership journeys with those of matched white managers. This article used semistructured interviews and attribution theory to examine how 20 black and minority ethnic and 20 white senior managers from a UK government department made sense of significant career incidents in their leadership journeys. Template analysis was used to identify facilitators and barriers of career progression from causal explanations of these incidents. Although BME and white managers identified four common themes (visibility, networks, development and line manager support), they differed in how they made sense of formal and informal organizational processes to achieve career progression. The findings are used to theorize about the individual and organizational factors that contribute to the leadership journeys of minority ethnic employees.
This study conceptualizes politicians as political workers. It describes a multimethod study with two aims: (1) to determine whether politicians share a latent mental model of performance in political roles and (2) to test hypothesized relationships between politician self‐rated characteristics (i.e., extroversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, Machiavellianism, and political skill) and received performance ratings from political colleagues and officers. Two hundred and thirty‐one local politicians provided self‐ratings on a political performance questionnaire developed following a role analysis, and standardized measures of personality. One hundred and eighty‐five also received performance ratings from colleagues (n = 749) and officers (n = 729). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of self‐ and received performance ratings revealed five latent factors: Resilience (RS), Politicking, Analytical Skills (AS), Representing People, and Relating to Others. Regression analyses found that neuroticism and conscientiousness contribute to received ratings of RS, and neuroticism contributes to received ratings of AS.
Practitioner points
As political roles require political work, we argue there is potential to use research and practice from I/O psychology to improve politician performance.
The existence of shared latent constructs of performance provides a basis for differentiated criterion assessment in political roles.
Evidence that individual differences contribute to political performance can be used to shape support activities for individuals in elected roles.
This inductive study extends scholarship on gender, feedback and leadership by drawing on a large naturalistic data set of 1057 narrative developmental feedback comments to 146 political leaders in the UK. We used automated topic modeling, a novel methodology, to identify 12 underlying topics within developmental feedback, and complemented this with an in-depth qualitative analyses of feedback content for male and female political leaders across the topics. This resulted in four aggregate theoretical dimensions: 1) strategic focus 2) political influence 3) confidence and 4) agency and communion. Our findings chart novel dimensions of gender bias that go beyond the widely theorized tension posed by agency [male] and communion [female]. These new dimensions are pertinent to developmental, rather than performance feedback processes, and provide male and female leaders with different developmental roadmaps. We outline the value of our novel methodology to leadership scholarship and discuss implications for future research and practice.
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