Post by Fabiola H. Gerpott

Celebrating the PhD defense of Sofia shown in the picture? Well, this photo is from four years ago... And it is an incredibly happy moment today to share that some of the research that was part of her dissertation on #femaleleadership is now published! Many PhD graduates plan to publish their dissertation work eventually but only a few actually follow through once they have moved on to new roles. In fact, this project started seven years ago, and I have rarely seen someone as dedicated as Sofia Schlamp, PhD to share these REALLY relevant findings on female and male managers' #claiming of #leadership in meetings and employees' reactions! The paper published in Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies dives into real workplace #meetings to understand how employees react to leaders claiming influence. Importantly, in contrast to most studies that only collect PERCEPTIONS of how male and female managers behave in a meeting, we analyzed the actual communication by coding over 37,000 verbal behaviors from 68 manager-employee dyads. In doing so, we found: 💡 Male and female managers claimed leadership equally through their language in meetings, and employees made no difference in granting it (i.e., accepting their influence attempts) verbally during the meeting 💡 However, what employees subsequently indicated in a questionnaire was different! The more female managers relatively younger than their employees claimed leadership during the meeting, the less likely they were to receive post-meeting endorsement from them (despite no signs of in-meeting resistance) 💡 For male managers, there was no such effect - age was unrelated to the endorsement they received for claiming leadership What does this mean for practice? We think it indicates that age and gender biases may still subtly shape how leadership is received. While people may not openly reject female influence, especially for relatively younger female managers, their authority may be quietly undermined (e.g., when filling in annual employee satisfaction or feedback surveys). A heartfelt thank you to Michelle Hammond for helping Sofia and me, as well as Tanja Hentschel, Dr. Lioba Gierke, and Niels Van Quaquebeke shape our paper. The article is available #openaccess, so please feel invited to read and reflect further!