Gender and leadership in organizations: Promotions, demotions and angry workers

Priyanka Chakraborty and Danila Serra

No 20210104-001, Working Papers from Texas A&M University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Managerial decisions, such as promotions and demotions, please some employees and upset others. We examine whether having to communicate such decisions to employees, and knowing that employees may react badly, have a differential impact on men's and women's self-selection into leadership roles and their performance if they become leaders. In a novel laboratory experiment that simulates corporate decision-making, we find that women are significantly less likely to self-select into a managerial position when employees can send them angry messages. Once in the manager role, there is some evidence of gender differences in decision-making, but no difference in final outcomes, i.e., overall profits. Male and female managers use different language to motivate their employees, yet differences in communication styles emerge only when workers can send angry messages to managers. Finally, low-rank employees send more angry messages to female managers, and are more likely to question their decisions.

Keywords: Gender Differences; Leadership; Backlash; Experiment. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D91 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 72 pages
Date: 2021-01-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gen, nep-hrm and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://pvsessions.tamu.edu/RePEc/serra_leadership.pdf First version, 2021 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to pvsessions.tamu.edu:443 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:txm:wpaper:20210104-001

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Texas A&M University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Pedro Bento ().