By Liz Hall
Female and male leaders share the same ‘classically masculine’ personality traits, suggests a paper published in Journal of Vocational Behavior.
A research team led by Bart Wille at the University of Antwerp accessed comprehensive personality tests taken by nearly 600 top-level executives (including 143 female bosses) and more than 52,000 non-executives (including 17,643 women) from diverse industries in Belgium and other European countries. They found that how women and men in non-leadership roles differed in their personality traits was consistent with existing literature. Women scored higher than men on characteristics to do with being more agreeable, such as being cooperative and people-oriented, for example. They scored lower on emotional stability and aspects of extraversion.
However, the personalities of male and female bosses were far more similar, with many gender-associated differences missing completely or greatly attenuated. Women bosses did still score higher on aspects of agreeableness, however.
On the other hand, male bosses were much more similar in their traits compared to non-managerial men.
Coaching women to be more assertive to help them gain promotion does seem to make sense, yet as we know from existing evidence, women are often criticised for displaying stereotypically masculine traits, and with this approach, there’s an assumption that women need to change, rather than the workplace culture. Wille and his team call on organisations to “strive to counter these biases” in the paper, Personality characteristics of male and female executives: Distinct pathways to success?
- Read it here: http://bit.ly/2FXeZVn