Sex roles and leadership revisited.

Abstract

A replication and extension of an earlier study (Megargee, 1969) was performed to reassess the part that sex roles play in the assumption of leadership. Megargee's original study indicated that women who had superior leadership ability failed to assert their roles in the presence of males m both masculine and neutral task situations. The current study replicated the masculine task and added a feminine task to assess, respectively, changes that have occurred over the years and the effect of task "gender" on assumption of leadership Subjects were 124 college students who had been pretested on the California Personality Inventory Dominance (Do) scale. Subjects were grouped into high-and low-Do pairs. As m the earlier studies, Do predicted leadership in same-sex pairs. But when the task was "masculine in appearance," high-Do women did not take the leadership role in the presence of men. When the task was modified to appear feminine in nature, Do scores predicted leadership across all groups.

Putting gender into context: An interactive model of gender-related behavior.

“…Megargee's (1969) often-cited study of leadership demonstrated that women's assumption of a leadership position depended on the sex of their partner. Replications of this study have found that sex rather than dominance scores predicts leadership for mixed-sex pairs when the task is either masculine (Carbonell, 1984) or gender neutral (Nyquist & Spence, 1986); when the task is feminine, however, dominance scores rather than sex are predictive (Carbonell, 1984). Similarly, Klein and Willerman (1979) showed that behavior varies as a function of the sex of the audience as well as the perceived demands of the situation.…”

Adorable woman, expert man: Changing gender images of women and men in management

“…There are on-going debates about whether the female manager's behaviour actually differs from the male manager's behaviour and whether male managers are still perceived and evaluated differently than female leaders (Carbonell, 1984;Dobbins and Platz, 1986;Donne11 and Hall, 1980;Powell, 1988;Rosen and Jerdee, 1973;Schein, 1973;Watson, 1988). Researchers generally agree that there are negligible gender differences in actual leadership behaviour but the perception of behaviour and the image of the power position differ (e.g.…”

The Impact of a Leader Model on High Dominant Women’s Self-Selection for Leadership

“…This task seems much like an interaction between a secretary and an executive, and those roles are highly likely to be gendertyped as feminine and masculine, respectively. In a more direct test of the moderating effects of the gender-typing of the task, Carbonell (1984) demonstrated that college women were significantly less likely to assume leadership, even when specifically chosen for their high Dominance scores and paired with men who scored lower on the Dominance scale, if they were presented with a masculine task. The masculine task required the partners to use a wrench and screwdriver to remove nuts and bolts from a panel; the use of those tools and the concept of repairing machinery are traditionally associated with men.…”