Leader evaluation and team cohesiveness in the process of team development: A matter of gender?

Núria Rovira-Asenjo, Agnieszka Pietraszkiewicz, Sabine Sczesny, Tània Gumí, Roger Guimerà and Marta Sales-Pardo

PLOS ONE, 2017, vol. 12, issue 10, 1-20

Abstract: Leadership positions are still stereotyped as masculine, especially in male-dominated fields (e.g., engineering). So how do gender stereotypes affect the evaluation of leaders and team cohesiveness in the process of team development? In our study participants worked in 45 small teams (4–5 members). Each team was headed by either a female or male leader, so that 45 leaders (33% women) supervised 258 team members (39% women). Over a period of nine months, the teams developed specific engineering projects as part of their professional undergraduate training. We examined leaders’ self-evaluation, their evaluation by team members, and team cohesiveness at two points of time (month three and month nine, the final month of the collaboration). While we did not find any gender differences in leaders’ self-evaluation at the beginning, female leaders evaluated themselves more favorably than men at the end of the projects. Moreover, female leaders were evaluated more favorably than male leaders at the beginning of the project, but the evaluation by team members did not differ at the end of the projects. Finally, we found a tendency for female leaders to build more cohesive teams than male leaders.

Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0186045 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 86045&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pone00:0186045

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0186045

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().