New Forms of Leadership Conference

We welcomed a great group for our "New Forms of Leadership" conference at TUM School of Management Executive Education on Friday, November 10, in Munich. Main themes included part-time and shared leadership models, leader's flexible accommodations (e.g., flex-place and -time) and family leaves, how digitization facilitates these new leadership and work models, and if such models are especially important for Generation Y (i.e., Millennials) or female employees.

Thanks again to our talented organizers, energizing speakers and science slammers, and engaged attendees from practice and research.

My science slam presentation of first results from our ForGenderCare Project, "Leaders who care," is here.

Counterintuitive consequences of maternal leave?

“Maybe Baby” expectations motivate subtle employee disrespect and work withdrawal

Pregnancy is…a wonderful thing for the woman, it’s a wonderful thing for the husband, it’s certainly an inconvenience for a business. -Donald Trump, President of the United States

Main Findings
Childfree working women report more subtle forms of disrespect (e.g., being interrupted or ignored) from colleagues and supervisors than childfree men, especially in organisations that offer more maternal leave than paternal leave. These uncivil experiences at work also predict employees' career withdrawal one year later.

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Comparison to the General View of the Topic
A wealth of research has highlighted mothers’ many employment disadvantages compared to childfree women and men; however, "actual motherhood is not necessary for young women to experience motherhood penalties” concludes study author Dr. Jamie L. Gloor. Although maternal leave is ostensibly intended to benefit working women (e.g., enhance their economic returns and job security), this might come at the cost of their subtle social mistreatment. Finally, states Dr. Gloor, "if these employees leave, then targeting female leaders and professors for study or intervention may be too late if women have already withdrawn at an earlier career stage."   

Data
Two waves of quantitative survey data were collected one year apart from 474 early career academics (i.e., PhD and post-doctoral students, assistant professors) from all federal and cantonal universities in Switzerland. 

Implications
"Maybe baby” expectations–highlighted by the organizational inconveniences that pregnancy may entail–may be another explanation for the gender gap in leadership and professorships. Thus, "to retain highly educated women in the workforce, reduce "brain drain" and turnover costs,” recommends Dr. Gloor, “organizations might consider making parental leave more accessible to men to reduce or balance out these maybe baby expectations and feelings of potential parental inconvenience toward young female and male employees.” She added, “of course the onus should not be on women to reduce others’ biases towards them, but they, too, can proactively clarify their career committment to reduce these negative efects.”

Reference
Gloor, J. L., Li, X., Lim, S., & Feierabend, A. (in press). An inconvenient truth? Interpersonal and career consequences of "maybe baby" expectations. Journal of Vocational Behavior.*

*This paper was recently honored with the "Emerald Best Paper Based on a Dissertation Award" (Gender and Diversity in Organizations Division) at the 2017 Academy of Management Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, as well as being included in the 2017 Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings. 

Dissertation Award for Jamie Gloor at Academy of Management 2017

Dr. Jamie L. Gloor has just been honored with the Emerald Best Dissertation Award. (Gender & Diversity in Organizations Division). She will be recognized at the upcoming Academy of Management annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia (USA) this August. This is the largest international conference in the field of management with 10,000+ scholar and practitioner attendees annually and 18,000+ members.  

The winning paper based on her dissertation completed at the chair in HRM at the University of Zurich is titled, "An inconvenient truth? Interpersonal and career consequences of 'maybe baby' expectations;" this paper was also recently selected for inclusion in the prestigious Best Paper Proceedings of the Academy of Management. It is coauthored with Xinxin Li (NUS), Prof. Sandy Lim (NUS), and Dr. Anja Feierabend (UZH) and based on a research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and swissuniversities' SUK Program 4 as part of the University of Zurich’s Action Plan Gender Equality (2013-16).

"Leaders who care: Better leaders by (not) being there?"

Last week, Jamie presented an empirical paper at the 50th European Association for Social Psychology in Granada, Spain titled, Caring leaders: The impact of parental leave on the perception of transformational leadership. Coauthored with Dr. Lisa Horvath, Professors Susanne Braun and Claudia Peus (abstract/more info here), this paper provides fresh, first results from the ForGenderCare project and was part of a stellar symposium titled, Barriers to achieving gender equality: Shortcomings of placing the burden on women with top gender, diversity, and leadership scholars (more info here).

EASP hosted ~1,200 scholars and practitioners from across Europe, the United States, Australia and beyond from disciplines such as social, developmental, and work psychology, management and organizational behavior. Jamie and her paper received a warm welcome with a room full of attendees and average temperatures that reached 30+ degrees... 

Just a few weeks prior, Jamie also presented the paper at the Executive Education Center of the Technical University of Munich as part of the Munich Leadership Colloquium, where she received encouraging and formative feedback.

Methodical Storytelling for Leaders

Esther Choy, President of the Leadership Story Lab, and Karl Schmedders, Professor of Quantitative Business Administration, will show us how to use storytelling to bridge the theory-practice gap in a 2-hour event on Thursday evening in Zurich (for more info, see here). Then on Friday, Esther will coach CareerElixier members and alumni in 2 private, small group sessions on how to apply storytelling and persuasion tactics in the context of our own research.

This event is organized by Dr. Hannah Trittin and myself, sponsored by CareerElixier, and generously funded by the Graduate Campus. 

Subtle Biases & Structural Change for Gender Equality at UZH

A recent article published in the University of Zurich (UZH) journal featured the 8 projects of the UZH Gender Equality Action Plan (2013-2016). For more information about the Action Plan, the individual projects, or specific results from several of the projects, see here.

As 1 of these 8, our "Assistant Professor Project" (together with Professor Bruno Staffelbach, Dr. Anja Feierabend, and Susanne Mehr, MA UZH) at the faculty for business, economics, and informatics was also featured. In this project, we examined the career and life stages leading up to and including the Assistant Professorship, to determine if this position is a suitable springboard for a professorship. Given that family formation overlays this critical career period, an event that entails more negative gender-based career stereotypes and expectations for women than for men, we also examined if achieving an Assistant Professorship (or higher) differs according to scholar gender, parenthood, or both factors.

Examining gender, parenthood, and the interaction of gender and parenthood (i.e., childless women and men, mothers and fathers) is key in light of the "maybe baby" bias, namely, expectations of risk that a young childless woman might have a child soon. In other words, scholar age is used as a proxy for childbearing chance, which triggers gendered expectations of uncertainty pertaining to temporary (during parental leave) or longer-term (drop-out from the labor market) cost and inconvenience for young female scholars, but not young male scholars.

In 2 peer-reviewed papers presented (2015) or accepted for presentation (2017) at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting, a yearly gathering of 10,000+ international management scholars, my coauthors and I argue that even potential parenthood can be hazardous for young women striving to get ahead in their careers: we show that "maybe baby" expectations contribute to gender biases in employment through decision-makers' hiring decisions towards young childless women (here) and coworkers' and supervisors' interpersonal treatment of young childless women (here).

Our central recommendation for an evidence-based structural change to reduce "maybe baby" bias is to more evenly allocate parental leave to both women and men. Currently, women are allotted significantly more parental leave than men at the national- and organizational-levels in Switzerland. Although likely well-intended to aid new mothers' work-life integration, these gender-based discrepancies in parental leave allocation asymmetrically increase the expected cost and inconvenience of women's (potential) childbearing, but not men's. For more information about the Assistant Professor project or our other recommendations, see our final report here.

A new year, a new...uni?!

University of Zurich --> Technical University of Munich, that is. 

I'm very excited to announce that I have just accepted a new post-doc position (from January 2017) at the Technical University of Munich (ranked #1 technical school in Germany, #4 in Europe). I'll be working for Dr. Claudia Peus, Professor of Research & Science Management, as leader of a project examining how gender, parenthood, and caregiving influence perceptions of leadership. The team has a history of publishing high-quality research on topics such as diversity and leadership, so I should fit right in (except for my Swiss German accent!)

I'm really looking forward to joining a new, research-focused team of kind, clever, and motivated young scholars-most of whom I've already met at international academic conferences-and the challenge of making the most of my 4-hour commute... 

"Work-Life & Diversity at the University" Student Poster Session

During our poster session on Friday, December 9th, at PLM-103/104 (Plattenstrasse 14), my 16 Master-level HRM students presented 5 empirical research projects around the topic of "Work-Life & Diversity," showcasing their original analyses using data collected from ~2,000 early career academics from all over Switzerland. 

For more info, see our flyer, handout, as well as all 5 posters here.

"Reinvent your career...?!" International Dual Career Network

Happy to be sharing my personal experiences (and of course, some empirics) about international job-seeking, dual careers, career transitions/changes, and strengths use (10:15-11:15). Join us!

--> Download original flyer with active links here

Harvard Features 'Fix the Game-Not the Dame'!

I'm very excited and honored to announce that some of my ideas are getting some air thanks to Harvard and the Gender Action Portal, a curated collection of causal evidence to reduce social and economic inequality for women. I've summarized the paper below and included a link to the Harvard summary. Looking forward to your thoughts and continuing the gender equality conversation!

Fix the game, not the dame:
A team gender approach to leadership equality

Across the globe, stereotypical beliefs about good leadership are largely gendered in favor of men. That is, men are evaluated as having more leadership potential than women, and men are evaluated as better leaders than women-even when performing the same leadership behaviors. Similarly, local stereotypes typically also converge in men’s favor due to the masculinity and male majority of many managerial positions. In other words, men comprise the majority of leadership positions, a gender gap that grows with increasing hierarchy, which reinforces stereotypical beliefs about men and women’s leadership.  

However, leaders are not stand-alone actors-they can also be conceptualized as extensions of the group. For example, a CEO is also an employee of the company. If this proposition is true, then beyond leaders’ own gender or their gender match with individual followers, team members’ evaluations of their leaders may depend on how representative he or she is viewed to be of the group. Given the aforementioned gender biases, the growing numbers of women in entry-level and middle management positions, and the fact that gender is one of the most quickly recognized social categories, my colleagues and I tested this idea in 70 newly created teams of 927 students with leaders (more senior students) from business and economics in Switzerland.

Together with Professor Backes-Gellner and Dr. Manuela Morf, we randomly assigned male and female leaders to male majority (approximately 20% women) or more gender balanced (40-50% women) teams. After leaders underwent 2 days of leadership training and then spent approximately 6 hours with their teams, we asked team members to rate how exemplary their leader was, including showing the traits and behaviors of a leader. As expected, in male majority teams, both male and female team members rated male leaders as more exemplary than the female leaders. However, this effect was completely eliminated in more gender balanced teams. Importantly, there were also no differences in leaders’ own evaluations of their exemplifying a leader according to their team gender.

Thus, intervening at the local, team level can trump the more global, societal biases in the case of gender and leadership. Our findings are especially important given the lack of evidence that leadership training is effective or transfers to the workplace. Furthermore, female leaders often face social backlash for being too masculine or inauthentic when emulating more masculine leadership behaviors. If other organizational constraints prevent teams from being organized according to gender, managers should seek to incorporate the gender composition of leaders’ teams in their performance evaluations or 360 ratings. Finally, other more deep-level traits might also be important for team members’ benchmarking their leaders’ representativeness of the group over time (e.g., values).

Check it out here!