When is female leadership an advantage? Coordination requirements, team cohesion, and team interaction norms

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2031
• Published date: 01 November 2015
• Date: 01 November 2015
• Author: Corinne Post

When is female leadership an advantage?

Coordination requirements, team cohesion, and

team interaction norms

CORINNE POST*

Lehigh University College of Business and Economics Bethlehem, PA, U.S.A.

Summary This study seeks to understand to what extent and in what contexts women leaders may be advantageous for

teams. More specifically, this study examines how team leader gender relates to team cohesion, cooperative

learning, and participative communication. Furthermore, the study argues that advantages derived from

female leadership may be contingent on teams’coordination requirements. I propose that as teams’coordina-

tion requirements increase (i.e., with functional diversity, size, and geographic dispersion), teams with women

leaders report more cohesion and more cooperative and participative interaction norms than those with men

leaders. I aggregated survey responses from the members of 82 teams in 29 organizations at the team level.

Findings from hierarchical linear modeling analyses suggest that female leadership is more positively associ-

ated with cohesion on larger and more functionally diverse teams and more positively associated with coop-

erative learning and participative communication on larger and geographically dispersed teams. These results

call for more research on boundary conditions on the relationship between leader gender and team outcomes,

on the role of relational leadership on complex and diverse teams and, ultimately, on the potential mediating

role of cohesion and team interaction norms on the relationship between leader gender and team performance.

Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: gender; teams; leadership; cohesion; interaction norms; cooperative learning; participative

communication; functional diversity; size; geographic dispersion

In a network economy that increasingly emphasizes the importance of relational skills, shared responsibilities,

coaching, and the nurturing and development of others (Adler, 2001; Fondas, 1997; Kanter & Zolner, 1986), the de-

bate over the existence of a female advantage in leadership has drawn considerable attention both in academic circles

(Eagly & Carli, 2003; Rosette & Tost, 2010; Vecchio, 2003) and in the business press (Conlin, 2003; Gerzema &

D’Antonio, 2013; Heffernan, 2002; Klotz, 2011; LaVine, 2014; Sharpe, 2000). The argument that there is a female

leadership advantage posits that because women, compared with men, tend to be more relational, more likely to

emphasize teamwork and collaboration over self-interest, and more participative in their leadership (Eagly &

Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001; Eagly, Johannesen-Schmidt, & van Engen, 2003), female leaders are more effective

than male leaders (Grant, 1988; Rosener, 1990). Yet, evidence for a female advantage in leadership is decidedly

mixed (Butterfield & Grinnell, 1999; Eagly, 2007; Paustian-Underdahl, Walker, & Woehr, 2014).

This study seeks to understand to what extent and in what contexts female leadership may be advantageous. One

explanation for the mixed evidence may be that the extent to which leader gender influences team outcomes depends

on the characteristics of the teams being led. For example, teams may benefit more from relational leadership as their

coordination requirements increase (Burke et al., 2006). In addition, the mixed results for the female leadership

advantage may reflect variation in the control leaders have on team performance relative to other, more proximal

outcomes, such as team cohesion and team interaction norms. Leader characteristics (e.g., gender) are likely to

*Correspondence to: Corinne Post, Collegeof Business and Economics,621 Taylor Street, Bethlehem,PA 18015, U.S.A. E-mail:cgp208@lehigh.

edu

Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Received 09 January 2014

Revised 04 May 2015, Accepted 08 May 2015

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 36, 1153–1175 (2015)

Published online 24 June 2015 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.2031

Research Article

explain more variation in proximal team outcomes (e.g., team climate and interaction norms) than in distal outcomes

(e.g., team performance and innovation).

This study contributes to the debate on the female advantage in leadership in two novel and important ways. First,

it seeks to understand in what contexts female leadership may be an advantage by identifying coordination require-

ments as contextual factors that create situations in which women leaders may be more successful than men.

Consideration of context is central to better understand manifestations of gender differences in leadership outcomes

(Butterfield & Grinnell, 1999; Liden & Antonakis, 2009; Vecchio, 2003). Role congruity studies (Eagly & Karau,

2002), for example, have documented that leader gender interacts with the gender typing of leaders’roles to influ-

ence subjective evaluations of leadership (Eagly, Karau, & Makhijani, 1995; Rosette & Tost, 2010; Vecchio, 2002).

This study differs from the work on role-congruity by identifying team coordination requirements (rather than gen-

der role and leadership role congruity) as a contextual factor that may exacerbate leader gender differences in team

outcomes. Drawing on the concept of coordination requirements, I propose that as teams become more functionally

diverse, larger or when they are geographically dispersed, teams led by women will report more cohesion and more

cooperative and participative interaction norms than those led by men. This happens, I argue, because teams with

higher coordination requirements (i.e., teams that are more functionally diverse, larger, and geographically dis-

persed) may require a more relational approach from their leaders, and a relational approach to leadership is more

readily available and accessible to women than to men.

As a second contribution, this study extends the present debate on leader gender and team outcomes by examining

how team leader gender may relate to team cohesion and to team interaction norms. Previous team-level studies con-

sidering gender differences in leadership have primarily focused on team-level performance outcomes or evaluations

of leader performance. This study differs from those studies by focusing on the quality of the relationship between

individuals and their team (e.g., cohesion) and on team interaction norms (i.e.,cooperative learning and participative

communication). I chose this focus because leaders may have a greater impact on proximal outcomes such as these

than on team performance, which is more distally related to team leadership. Further, by relying on members’eval-

uation of team cohesion and team interaction norms rather than on members’evaluations of team leaders, this study

may be able to mitigate the risk of gender biases that, as others have documented, may influence leader evaluations

(Elsesser & Lever, 2011; Heilman, Wallen, Fuchs, & Tamkins, 2004).

While performance evaluations of leaders are an important consideration in research on gender and leadership

effectiveness, an examination of leader gender effects on team cohesion and team interaction norms is sorely missing

from this body of research. This is the case despite evidence that leadership influences both the quality of the rela-

tionship between individuals and their team (Burke, Fiore, & Salas, 2003; Zaccaro, Rittman, & Marks, 2002) and

team norms (Lott & Lott, 1965; Taggar & Ellis, 2007), which is legitimate, socially shared standards of appropriate

behavior (Birenbaum & Sagarin, 1976) that influence how members of a team “perceive and interact with one

another, approach decisions, and solve problems”(Chatman & Flynn, 2001: 956). This study focuses on team

cohesion, cooperative learning, and participative communication as outcomes of team leader gender because these

outcomes are indicative of the quality of the relationship between individuals and their team and of other-centered,

cooperative team norms that emphasize cooperation, shared objectives, and mutual interests among members

(Chatman & Flynn, 2001) and because research suggests that relational individuals (e.g., women) show more con-

cern for others and for the collective.

Theoretical background

The expectation that female leaders will foster more cohesion, cooperative learning, and participative communica-

tion than male leaders rests on the argument that female leaders are more likely to have a relational self-construal

than male leaders—that is, a conception of themselves as relatively interdependent, relational, and interconnected

(Cross & Madson, 1997; Markus & Kitayama, 1991)—which, research finds, fosters team cohesion and communal

interaction norms such as cooperative learning and participative communication.

1154 C. POST

Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Organiz. Behav. 36, 1153–1175 (2015)

DOI: 10.1002/job