The communality-bonus effect for male transformational leaders – leadership style, gender, and promotability

Hentschel, T.; Braun, S.; Peus, C.; Frey, D.

doi:10.1080/1359432x.2017.1402759

The communality-bonus effect for male transformational leaders – leadership style, gender, and promotability

Hentschel, T.; Braun, S.; Peus, C.; Frey, D.

Authors

T. Hentschel

Professor Susanne Braun susanne.braun@durham.ac.uk
Professor

C. Peus

D. Frey

Abstract

Women have made considerable inroads into the workforce but remain underrepresented in leadership positions. Even though studies show that men and women hardly differ in their leadership behaviours, we argue that male and female leaders are evaluated differentially contingent on the gender-congruence of their leadership style. Drawing arguments from expectancy violation theory, we investigate evaluations of men and women who show transformational leadership (a style consisting of communal behaviours in line with stereotypes about women) and autocratic leadership (a style consisting of agentic behaviours in line with stereotypes about men). We employed a three-study research design combining two experimental studies and a two-wave field study with business leaders (overall N = 344). Overall transformational leadership resulted in higher evaluations of promotability due to higher perceptions of leaders’ communality and leadership effectiveness. Importantly, these effects were stronger for men, and men showing transformational leadership were evaluated to be more promotable than women. This implies a communality-bonus effect for male transformational leaders. There was no difference in promotability evaluations for women versus men showing autocratic leadership. This effect was mediated by agency and effectiveness perceptions for women but not for men. Implications are discussed.

Citation

Hentschel, T., Braun, S., Peus, C., & Frey, D. (2019). The communality-bonus effect for male transformational leaders – leadership style, gender, and promotability. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 27(1), 112-125. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432x.2017.1402759

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Nov 1, 2017
Online Publication Date	Nov 22, 2017
Publication Date	2019
Deposit Date	Nov 2, 2017
Publicly Available Date	Nov 2, 2017
Journal	European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology
Print ISSN	1359-432X
Electronic ISSN	1464-0643
Publisher	Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	27
Issue	1
Pages	112-125
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432x.2017.1402759
Public URL	https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1344911

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Copyright Statement
© 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.