The Importance of Similarity: How Gender Congruence Matters for the Impact of Leadership Training

• Author: Trine H. Fjendbo,Christian B. Jacobsen,Seung-Ho An
• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Date: 01 September 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00953997211064220
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00953997211064220

Administration & Society

2022, Vol. 54(8) 1542 –1571

© The Author(s) 2021

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/00953997211064220

journals.sagepub.com/home/aas

Article

The Importance of

Similarity: How Gender

Congruence Matters for

the Impact of Leadership

Training

Trine H. Fjendbo1, Christian B. Jacobsen1,

and Seung-Ho An2

Abstract

Leadership training is key to promoting more active leadership, but the

effects of leadership training can depend on the gender context. Gender

congruence between manager and employee can affect how the manager

employs leadership behaviors adapted from training and how employees

perceive leadership behavior. Quantitative data on 474 managers’ 4,833

employees before and after a large-scale field experiment with leadership

training enable us to examine changes in employee-perceived leadership

following training. The results show that gender congruence between

manager and employee is associated with stronger leadership training effects

on employee-perceived leadership behaviors. Female gender congruence

shows the most pronounced effects.

Keywords

leadership training, gender congruence, perceived leadership, transformational

leadership, transactional leadership

1Aarhus University, Denmark

2University of Arizona, Tucson, USA

Corresponding Author:

Trine H. Fjendbo, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Bartholins Alle 7,

Aarhus 8000, Denmark.

Email: trinefjendbo@live.dk

1064220AAS0010.1177/00953997211064220Administration & SocietyFjendbo et al.

research-article2021

Fjendbo et al. 1543

Introduction

Gender is an ever-present context in which leadership is enacted, communi-

cated, and perceived. According to the literature on gender and leadership,

male and female managers tend to exercise leadership differently because of

early socialization experiences (Eagly & Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001).

Empirical research has found that gender differences exist in the use of leader-

ship strategies, such as transformational and transactional leadership (e.g., Bass

et al., 1996; Eagly & Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001; Eagly et al., 2003). Yet,

research on leadership training tends to overlook the role of gender (Schachter,

2017; Seidle et al., 2016) or is only focused on the manager’s gender (An &

Meier, 2020), with rare accounts of the importance of employee gender.

Leadership works through interactions between managers and employees,

and we argue that taking the gender of both the manager and the employee

into account is important to understand how leadership training is imple-

mented and perceived in organizations. According to the similarity/attraction

(Byrne, 1971) and social identity (Tajfel & Turner, 1986) theories, individu-

als with similar characteristics are more likely to have a higher mutual under-

standing, acceptance, and social connection. Based on these theoretical

premises, we claim that the effects of leadership training will depend on gen-

der congruence between manager and employee, that is, gender similarity

between manager and employee, for two reasons. First, we argue that manag-

ers are more inclined to increase trained leadership behavior toward gender-

congruent employees; second, we argue that gender-congruent employees

perceive more of their manager’s adapted leadership behavior because they

understand their manager better.

The study uses data from a randomized field experiment in Denmark to

investigate whether gender congruence between manager and employee

moderates the effects of leadership training on employee-perceived leader-

ship behavior. We study employee-perceived leadership because it allows us

to investigate the transmission of leadership training. We achieve a better

understanding of the mechanism by not including employees’ actions but,

instead, their perceptions. Studying employee-perceived leadership has the

limitation that we do not know what the effect is on performance. However,

the effectiveness of leadership in relation to organizational performance often

depends on the employees’ perceptions of leadership, and more so than on the

leaders’ own perceptions (Jacobsen & Bøgh Andersen, 2015), but this is

beyond the scope of this article. In terms of leadership, the study focuses on

transformational and transactional leadership styles, which are well-devel-

oped concepts with relevance in both public and private organizations (e.g.,

Jacobsen & Bøgh Andersen, 2015, 2017; Park & Rainey, 2008; Trottier et al.,