Dynamics of upward influence: How male and female managers get their way

Face and fortune: Inferences of personality from Managing Partners' faces predict their law firms' financial success

“…Future work may therefore wish to examine these effects for female leaders to determine how gender differences may affect the processes reviewed here (but see Rule & Ambady, 2009). This may be especially relevant for traits relating to Warmth, which among the male sample of targets here showed no effect but potentially could for female leaders who are believed to utilize such communal traits in leading others (e.g., Lauterbach & Weiner, 1996).…”

She’s Got the Look: Inferences from Female Chief Executive Officers’ Faces Predict their Success

“…The investigation of similarities and differences between male and female leaders, and particularly business executives, has produced somewhat mixed results. Whereas much research suggests that women and men lead, and are perceived to lead, in distinct ways (e.g., Lauterbach and Weiner 1996), others have explained these differences as often being due to experimental artifacts (e.g., Eagly and Johnson 1990). The current work supports the latter argument: similar relationships between company profits and perceived leadership ability were found for male CEOs in previous work and for female CEOs in the current work, suggesting that the ability to infer success from faces is applicable to both male and female CEOs.…”

“…Specifically, we wondered whether male and female CEOs might be perceived differently in association with male-and female-stereotyped traits. Thus, we expected that female CEOs might be rated significantly higher on communal traits, such as likeability and trustworthiness, and that male CEOs might be rated significantly higher on agentic traits, such as competence, dominance, and facial maturity (see also Lauterbach and Weiner 1996).…”

“…Some researchers report considerable differences between male and female business leaders in both behavior and personality. For instance, female managers have been characterized as attending more to the interests of the organization and as considering multiple others' perspectives with regard to planning, thus focusing on warmth or "communal" qualities, whereas male managers have been characterized as attending more to self-interests and planning alone, thus focusing on power or "agentic" qualities (e.g., Lauterbach and Weiner 1996). But the majority of work reporting differences between male and female business leaders relates more to perceptions than to observable differences (see Eagly and Johnson 1990;Eagly and Karau 2002).…”

“…Given that males and females are stereotypically associated with different traits, as reviewed above, we wondered whether participants might rate the male and female CEOs' faces differently. For instance, one hypothesis might suggest that women should be perceived higher on communal traits (i.e., likeability and trustworthiness) whereas men should be perceived higher on agentic traits (i.e., competence, dominance, and facial maturity; Lauterbach and Weiner 1996). However, given that the actual prevalence of such differences between men and women is debated (see Eagly and Johnson 1990), a competing hypothesis may be that the men and women would not be perceived differently.…”