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Abstract
The enduring gap between men and women in the attainment of positions of leadership has been largely investigated using a social role approach, which attributes women’s lower prevalence in positions of leadership to perceived incongruities between women’s social roles and traditional leadership attributes. However, the gender socialization literature suggests an alternative explanation: The distinct group ‘cultures’ experienced by boys and girls in childhood may result in different expectations about how leadership is structured in teams in adulthood. Leveraging research on gender socialization in groups, leadership and followership identity formation, and informal leadership emergence, I propose that men and women tend to differ in terms of their perception of leadership structures in teams, such that women are more likely to perceive leadership as shared and distributed than are men. In a series of three studies, I examine the nature of gender-based differences in the perception of leadership relationships in teams. In Study 1, I use a mixed-methods approach to evaluate whether men and women differ in terms of their implicit definitions of leadership and perceived leadership structure. In Study 2, I evaluate whether women are more likely to grant leadership to others and whether men are more likely to be granted leadership in their professional networks, controlling for network dependencies and relational tendencies, using an organizational sample of top and middle managers. Finally, in Study 3, using an experimental design, I test whether women are more likely to perceive leadership as distributed and/or decentralized than are men, controlling for the team scenario.