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Gender Differences in Leadership Role Occupancy: The Mediating Role of Power Motivation

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Abstract

Although the proportion of women in leadership positions has grown over the past decades, women are still underrepresented in leadership roles, which poses an ethical challenge to society at large but business in particular. Accordingly, a growing body of research has attempted to unravel the reasons for this inequality. Besides theoretical progress, a central goal of these studies is to inform measures targeted at increasing the share of women in leadership positions. Striving to contribute to these efforts and drawing on several theoretical approaches, the present study provides a contemporary examination of (a) whether women and men differ in their levels of power motivation and (b) whether potential gender differences in this motivation contribute to the unequal distribution of women and men in leadership positions. Results from four studies provide converging support for these assumptions. Specifically, we found that women consistently reported lower power motivation than men. This in turn mediated the link between gender and leadership role occupancy. These results were robust to several methodological variations including samples from different populations (i.e., student samples and large heterogeneous samples of employee), diverse operationalizations of power motivation and leadership role occupancy (self- and other ratings), and study design (cross-sectional and time-lagged designs). Implications for theory and practice, including ways to contribute to a more equal gender distribution in leadership positions, are discussed.

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Notes

  1. As noted earlier, we used three different scales of power motivation across our studies to ensure that our findings were not artifacts of the scales we applied. To provide further justification for this approach, we conducted a pilot study to examine the correlations among the scales (N = 57 students). Results revealed that the scales were highly related with correlations consistently ≥.75.

  2. Some groups did not include any male participants (yet no group included only men). To examine whether this had an effect on power motivation and leadership role occupancy, we compared the scores of female students with versus without male group members. ANOVAs showed no significant differences between the two groups on power motivation, F(1, 48) = .00, p = .95, or leadership role occupancy, F(1, 48) = .85, p = .36. Hence, the presence of male group members did not significantly affect the scores of female students.

  3. Please note that 90 % confidence intervals around indirect effects correspond to one-tailed testing at α = .05. As methodologists have repeatedly noted, it is fully adequate to examine directional mediation hypotheses using one-tailed testing (i.e., 90 % confidence intervals; Preacher et al. 2010).

  4. For Studies 3 and 4, we also conducted all hypothesis tests using industry as an additional control. To this end, we applied the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system by the US Department of Labor, which distinguishes 10 broad industrial categories. The SIC has been widely applied in previous studies (e.g., Probst et al. 2008). Importantly, including industry as a control (i.e., nine dummy variables coding the 10 industry types) did not change the pattern of results. Given space restrictions in the tables (i.e., in Tables 5, 6), the results are not reported here; however, they are available from the first author.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Alice H. Eagly for her helpful comments and suggestions during the preparation of this manuscript.

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  1. Institute of Psychology, Goethe University, Grüneburgplatz 1, 60323, Frankfurt, Germany

    Sebastian C. Schuh, Alina S. Hernandez Bark & Rolf Van Dick

  2. Department of Management and Economics, Kühne Logistics University, Hamburg, Germany

    Niels Van Quaquebeke

  3. Institute of Psychology, Ruhr-University, Bochum, Germany

    Rüdiger Hossiep & Philip Frieg

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Schuh, S.C., Hernandez Bark, A.S., Van Quaquebeke, N. et al. Gender Differences in Leadership Role Occupancy: The Mediating Role of Power Motivation. J Bus Ethics 120, 363–379 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-013-1663-9

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