“Think Leader—Think Male”?: Challenging the Centrality of Masculinity within the Ideal Leader Concept Graham Lowman, Mark Hiatt, Lee Macenczak, Ji Qi, and Peter D. Harms
Coles Working Paper Series, FALL20-08, November 2020
Overview Prior research has found that individuals generally view leadership as a male role. This bias is entrenched in society and many organizations, leading to the reflexive association: “think leader—think male”. Here, we use the novel psychological network analysis methodology to challenge this paradigm, proposing that gender occupies a decentralized position within the ideal leader concept. Replicated across three samples—undergraduate and graduate students (n=517) and working adults from online panel and crowdsource platforms (n=1,120; n=321)—results indicate that the “think leader—think male” paradigm fails to capture how individuals conceptualize their ideal leader. In fact, they place considerably less importance on leaders being male or masculine than previously thought. While some differences exist across samples, the overall results indicate that a more accurate paradigm would be “think leader—think intelligent”. However, we encourage future research to explore why discrepancies exist between individuals’ ideal leader concept and actual workplace behavior based on sex-role expectations.
22 | Working Papers
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