Can institutionalized workplace structures benefit senior women leaders?
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Can institutionalized workplace structures benefit senior women leaders? Peter A. Murray 1 & Kim Southey 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Drawing on interviews conducted with a sample of 27 senior women leaders from across Australian industries, this study found that legitimate workplace structures disrupt and challenge the subliminal status effects of gender on perceived task or role performance. This related to structures such as increased opportunities for promotion into higher status roles and opportunities to participate in unstructured group-task roles. These findings were in stark contrast to traditional workplace structures where senior women leaders relied on their ability alone to reach the top. Our findings have significant implications for organizations wishing to legitimize and replicate HRM policy levers that help to formalize workplace structures of equality and counter prevailing gender stereotypes. Keywords Status characteristics theory . Status expectations . Institutional theory .
Institutionalized workplace structures . Gender . Women in leadership . Mentoring . Equality . Group status . Diversity and inclusion This study explores whether an institutionalized approach towards supporting women leaders can reduce the gap between gendered stereotypes and perceived performance around task and role success. A cross-theory approach between status characteristics theory (SCT) and institutional theory forms the basis of the research. SCT focuses on the group-based view of organizing processes. Status characteristics theory suggests that the status assessments of individuals occurs frequently in informal problem-solving groups. Generally, although the more obvious status assessments relate to differences in age, gender, race and ethnicity, they extend more broadly to other differences e.g.,
* Kim Southey [email protected] Peter A. Murray [email protected]
1
School of Management & Enterprise, Faculty of Business, Education, Law &Arts, University of Southern Queensland, QLD, Toowoomba 4350, Australia
P. A. Murray, K. Southey
assessment of task-related skills. These subconscious assessments influence the perceived competence and status ranking of group members in the performance of a task. Women face at least two well-known biases based on gendered perceptions of their ability according to gender narratives. First, the agentic traits associated with effective leadership - such as ambition, assertiveness, self-confidence and competitiveness are attributed less to women than men (Eagly & Carli, 2012). According to scholars, women have maternal bodies, flooded with hormones that make them incapable of rational decision-making and represent a risk to productivity (Gatrell, Cooper, & Kossek, 2017). Second, to avoid either activating feminine stereotypes or violating masculine ones, women appear to be limited to a narrow band of acceptable career behaviours (Zhu, Konrad, & Jiao, 2016). When women exhibit male-typed ability, they are less effective
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