Reconciling female agentic advantage and disadvantage with the CADDIS measure of agency.

Abstract

Contradictory findings about whether agentic women are penalized or rewarded persist in gender and leadership research. To account for these divergent effects, we distinguish between agentic traits that people believe female leaders ought to possess (i.e., agency prescriptions) and ought not possess (i.e., agency proscriptions). We draw on expectancy violation theory to suggest that an agentic advantage is elicited when women are perceived to violate agency prescriptions (e.g., competence), whereas an agentic disadvantage is elicited when they are perceived to violate agency proscriptions (e.g., dominance). We first developed and validated a new, six-factor measure of agency in Studies 1 and 2, CADDIS (i.e., Competent agency, Ambitious agency, Dominant agency, Diligent agency, Independent agency, and Self-assured agency). We theorized that these agency factors represented distinct agency prescriptions and proscriptions for men and women. In Studies 3-5, we found that this six-factor conceptualization of agency not only reconciles existing tensions within the gender and leadership literature, but also leads to a different understanding of past conclusions-an agentic advantage occurs when women are perceived to possess competent agency, diligent agency, and independent agency, and an agentic disadvantage occurs when women are perceived to possess dominant agency.

Heavier Lies Her Crown: Gendered Patterns of Leader Emotional Labor and Their Downstream Effects

“…A plethora of studies following role congruity theory ( Eagly and Karau, 2002 ) have demonstrated that female leaders are evaluated negatively when they enact their role in dominant ways—for instance, when they discipline or give negative feedback to subordinates ( Sinclair and Kunda, 2000 ; Atwater et al, 2001 ; Brett et al, 2005 ) or when they demand a behavior change in others ( Williams and Tiedens, 2016 ). These dominant behaviors, which are antithetical to emotional labor, lead to a perceived “communality deficit” in female leaders ( Heilman and Okimoto, 2007 ; see also Ma et al, 2022 ), causing them to be seen as cold and interpersonally hostile ( Heilman and Okimoto, 2007 ). Women (but not men) who lead with a directive style are more likely to receive negative evaluations than women who lead with a democratic style ( Eagly et al, 1992 ), and abusive leadership tends to be penalized more harshly in female than in male leaders ( Kim et al, 2021 ).…”

Gender relativism: How context shapes what is seen as male and female.

“…Currently, masculinity and femininity are measured with a number of different traits and adjectives (e.g., Bem, 1974; Colley et al, 2009), which vary across research labs and projects. Indeed, in social psychology, scholars pick and choose from over 100 adjectives used to measure agency/masculinity (see Ma et al, 2022). If gender is created within context, the construct itself could vary as a function of the words included in the scales used.…”

Proactivity and Job Search: The Mediating Role of Psychological Closeness With External Mentors

“…We conducted a second study with a larger sample size from a different data source. We used Prolific Academic, which has been found to provide high-quality data (Ma et al, 2022). The data source provides panel data among diverse industries and occupations to minimize contextual constraints and enhance generalizability across settings (Watkins et al, in press).…”

“…Furthermore, we argue that gender may amplify the indirect effect of psychological closeness with external mentors, specifically for women, who deserve access to internal mentors yet face greater barriers than men (Bohnet, 2016; Colella et al, 2017; Ma et al, 2022; Roberson et al, 2017; Roberson, 2019; Ragins, 1997a, 1997b). Women are relatively less likely to reach the status of CEO by five-fold (Chanland & Murphy, 2018) and hold fewer than 1% representation of executive and senior-level manager positions (Roberson et al, 2020).…”