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Journal of Business and Psychology Vol. 27, No. 1 (March 2012) , pp. 31-42 (12 pages) Published By: Springer https://www.jstor.org/stable/41474904 Read and download Log in through your school or library Abstract Purpose: Several studies have shown that the traditional stereotype of a "good" manager being masculine and male still exists. The recent changes in the proportion of women and female managers in organizations could affect these two managerial stereotypes, leading to a stronger preference for feminine characteristics and female leaders. This study examines if the gender of an employee, the gender of the manager, and the management gender ratio in an organization are related to employees' managerial stereotypes. Design/Methodology/Approach: 3229 respondents working in various organizations completed an electronic questionnaire. Findings: The results confirm our hypotheses that, although the general stereotype of a manager is masculine and although most prefer a man as a manager, female employees, employees with a female manager, and employees working in an organization with a high percentage of female managers, have a stronger preference for feminine characteristics of managers and for female managers. Moreover, we find that proximal variables are much stronger predictors of these preferences than more distal variables. Implications: Our study suggests that managerial stereotypes could change as a result of personal experiences and changes in the organizational context. The results imply that increasing the proportion of female managers is an effective way to overcome managerial stereotyping. Originality/Value: This study examines the influence on managerial stereotypes of various proximal and distal factors derived from theory among a large group of employees (in contrast to students). Journal Information Journal of Business and Psychology is an international forum for the publication of empirical research, case studies, and literature reviews dealing with psychological concepts and services implemented in business settings. Written by psychologists, behavioral scientists, and organizational specialists employed in business, industry, and academia, peer-reviewed original articles deal with all aspects of psychology that apply to the business sector. Typical subject matters include, but are not limited to: Mentoring, Socialization, Coaching, Leadership Development, Counterproductive Behavior, Emotions at Work, Withdrawal, Cross-Cultural Issues, Groups, Inclusion, Diversity, Creativity, Job Analysis, Job Design, Job Attitudes, Job Performance, Citizenship Behavior, Judgment and Decision Making, Leadership, Employment Law, Measurement, Motivation, Occupational Health, Stress, Organizational Culture, Climate, Organizational Justice, Organizational Performance, OD, Performance Appraisal, Feedback, Research Methodology, Staffing and Selection, Strategic HR, Training, Work and Family. Publisher Information Springer is one of the leading international scientific publishing companies, publishing over 1,200 journals and more than 3,000 new books annually, covering a wide range of subjects including biomedicine and the life sciences, clinical medicine, physics, engineering, mathematics, computer sciences, and economics. Rights & Usage This item is part of a JSTOR Collection. Recognition of objects is one of this process’s major functions. For example, both people and animals recognize familiar objects in their environments. People must recognize objects to meaningfully interact with their environment. But since organizational behavior’s (OB’s) principal focus is on people, social perception is emphasized rather than object perception. Direction of gaze: Gaze is the first step in the perception process because it focuses your attention and tells the brain what you think is important in the immediate environment. Needs and goals: We are more likely to perceive whatever is related to our goals and to our needs. Experience with target: Our perception of a target is influenced by our past experience with him or her. Category-based knowledge: This knowledge consists of perceptions, including stereotypes, that we have stored in memory about various categories of people that we use to interpret what we see and hear. Gender and emotional status: Women recognize emotions more accurately than men, and experiencing negative emotions such as anger and frustration is likely to make your perceptions more negative. Cognitive load: Cognitive load represents the amount of activity going on in your brain; your perceptions are more likely to be distorted and susceptible to stereotypical judgments if you are tired. Characteristics of the Target: Characteristics of the Situation: Implicit cognition represents any thoughts or beliefs that are automatically activated from memory without our conscious awareness. The existence of implicit cognition leads people to make biased decisions without an understanding that it is occurring. Managers can be trained to understand and reduce this type of hidden bias. Bias can be reduced by using structured as opposed to unstructured interviews, and by relying on evaluations from multiple interviewers rather than just one or two people. More and more companies are using virtual interviews as a tool for reducing problems associated with implicit cognition. Faulty schemata about good versus poor performance can lead to inaccurate performance appraisals, which erode morale. Therefore, managers must accurately identify and communicate the behavioral characteristics and results they look for in good performance at the beginning of a review cycle. Furthermore, because memory for specific instances of employee performance deteriorates over time, managers need a mechanism for accurately recalling employee behavior. Research demonstrates that employees’ evaluations of leader effectiveness are influenced strongly by their schemata of good and poor leaders. A stereotype is an individual’s set of beliefs about the characteristics or attributes of a group. Stereotypes are not always negative. For example, the belief that engineers are good at math is certainly part of a stereotype. Stereotypes may or may not be accurate. Unfortunately, stereotypes can lead to poor decisions. Specifically they can create barriers for women, older individuals, people of color, and people with disabilities, all while undermining loyalty and job satisfaction. Categorization. We categorize people into groups according to criteria (such as gender, age, race, and occupation). Inferences. Next, we infer that all people within a particular category possess the same traits or characteristics. Expectations. We form expectations of others and interpret their behavior according to our stereotypes. Maintenance. We maintain stereotypes by overestimating the frequency of stereotypic behaviors exhibited by others, incorrectly explaining expected and unexpected behaviors, differentiating minority individuals from ourselves. Research shows that it takes accurate information and motivation to reduce the use of stereotypes. Three ways that this can be achieved: Managers should educate people about stereotypes and how they can influence our behavior and decision making. Managers should create opportunities for diverse employees to meet and work together in cooperative groups of equal status. Managers should encourage all employees to strive to increase their awareness regarding stereotypes. Awareness helps reduce the application of stereotypes when making decisions and when interacting with others. Formally defined, causal attributions are suspected or inferred causes of behavior. Managers need to understand how people formulate these attributions because the attributions profoundly affect organizational behavior. Kelley hypothesized that people make causal attributions by observing three dimensions of behavior: consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency. These dimensions vary independently, forming various combinations and leading to differing attributions. While other combinations are possible, the two options shown above have been most frequently studied. Say all employees are performing poorly (high consensus) on only one of several tasks (high distinctiveness) and during only one time period (low consistency). A supervisor will probably attribute the employees’ poor performance to an external source such as a temporary distraction or event. In contrast, if only one employee performs poorly (low consensus), across several tasks (low distinctiveness), and over time (high consistency), the supervisor will likely attribute performance to personal factors. The self-serving bias represents one’s tendency to take more personal responsibility for success than for failure. The self-serving bias suggests employees will attribute their success to internal factors (high ability or hard work) and their failures to uncontrollable external factors (tough job, bad luck, unproductive coworkers, or an unsympathetic boss). This tendency plays out in all aspects of life. Other attributional biases may lead managers to take inappropriate actions. Such actions could include promotions, transfers, layoffs, and so forth. This can dampen motivation and performance. Attributional training sessions can help. Basic attributional processes can be explained, and we can be taught to detect and avoid attributional biases. An employee’s attributions for his or her own performance have dramatic effects on subsequent motivation, performance, and personal attitudes such as self- esteem. For instance, people tend to give up, develop lower expectations for future success, and experience decreased self-esteem when they attribute failure to a lack of ability. Employees are more likely to display high performance and job satisfaction when they attribute success to internal factors such as ability and effort. SOURCE: Gardenswartz, Lee, and Anita Rowe. Diverse Teams at Work: Capitalizing on the Power of Diversity. Virginia: Society For Human Resource Management, 2003. Figure 4.5 shows that personality is at the center of the diversity wheel because it represents a stable set of characteristics responsible for a person’s identity. The next layer of diversity includes internal dimensions that are referred to as surface-level dimensions of diversity. Surface-level characteristics are those that are quickly apparent to interactants, such as race, gender, and age. Because these characteristics are viewed as unchangeable, they strongly influence our attitudes, expectations, and assumptions about others, which, in turn, influence our behavior. Figure 4.3 shows that the next layer of diversity comprises external influences. They represent individual differences that we have a greater ability to influence or control. Examples include where you live today, your religious affiliation, whether you are married and have children, and your work experiences. These dimensions also exert a significant influence on our perceptions, behavior, and attitudes. The final layer of diversity includes organizational dimensions such as seniority, work location, and job title and function. Integrating these last two layers results in what is called deep-level characteristics of diversity. Deep-level characteristics are those that take time to emerge in interactions, such as attitudes, opinions, and values. These characteristics are definitely under our control. Discrimination occurs when employment decisions about an individual are due to reasons not associated with performance or are not related to the job. For example, organizations cannot discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, physical or mental disabilities, or pregnancy. An access-and-legitimacy perspective on diversity is based on recognizing that the organization’s markets and constituencies are culturally diverse. It therefore behooves the organization to match the diversity in parts of its own workforce as a way of gaining access to and legitimacy with those markets and constituent groups. One study discovered that customer satisfaction and employee productivity were higher when the racio-ethnic composition of customers matched that of store employees. Various statistics support the existence of a glass ceiling. The pay gap between men and women is one example. In 2012, the median weekly income in full-time management, professional, and related occupations was $1,328 for men in contrast to $951 for women. This gap includes MBA graduates. Female graduates from top MBA programs earned 93 cents for every dollar earned by a male graduate, and the pay gap tends to increase over time. A WSJ/NBC national poll revealed that 40 percent of the women reported experiencing gender discrimination. Educational attainment: Women earned the majority of bachelor’s and master’s degrees from 2006 through 2012. Seats on boards of directors of Fortune 500 firms: 9.6% in 1995 and 16.6% in 2013. Leadership positions in educational institutions: In 2010, women represented 18.7% of college presidents and 29.9% of board members. Federal court appointments: In 2013, 32% and 30% of Federal Courts of Appeals and U.S. District Court judges, respectively, were women. And yet, three additional trends suggest that current-day minority groups are stalled at their own glass ceiling. Ethnocentrism: The ethnocentrism barrier represents the feeling that one’s cultural rules and norms are superior or more legitimate than the rules and norms of another culture. Poor career planning: This barrier is associated with the lack of opportunities for diverse employees to get the type of work assignments that qualify them for senior management positions. A negative diversity climate: We define organizational climate as employee perceptions about an organization’s formal and informal policies, practices, and procedures. Diversity climate is a subcomponent of an organization’s overall climate and is defined as the employees’ aggregate “perceptions about the organization’s diversity-related formal structure characteristics and informal values.” An unsupportive and hostile working environment for diverse employees: Sexual, racial, and age harassment are common examples of hostile work environments. Whether perpetrated against women, men, older individuals, or LGBT people, hostile environments are demeaning, unethical, and appropriately called “work environment pollution.” Lack of political savvy on the part of diverse employees: Diverse employees may not get promoted because they do not know how to “play the game” of getting along and getting ahead in an organization. Research reveals that women and people of color are excluded from organizational networks. Difficulty in balancing career and family issues: Women still assume the majority of the responsibilities associated with raising children. Fears of reverse discrimination: Some employees believe that managing diversity is a smoke screen for reverse discrimination. This belief leads to very strong resistance because people feel that one person’s gain is another’s loss. Diversity is not seen as an organizational priority: This leads to subtle resistance that shows up in the form of complaints and negative attitudes. Employees may complain about the time, energy, and resources devoted to diversity that could have been spent doing “real work.” The need to revamp the organization’s performance appraisal and reward system: Performance appraisals and reward systems must reinforce the need to effectively manage diversity. This means that success will be based on a new set of criteria. Resistance to change: Effectively managing diversity entails significant organizational and personal change. This choice may be an outgrowth of affirmative-action programs. Its primary goal is to either increase or decrease the number of diverse people at all levels of the organization. Option 2:
Deny. Option 3: Assimilate. Option 4: Suppress. Option 5: Isolate. Option 6: Tolerate. Option 7: Build relationships. Option 8: Foster mutual adaptation. Which of the following are key perceiver characteristics that affect our perceptions of others check all that apply?six key perceiver characteristics that affect our perceptions of others. " Direction of gaze." Needs and goals." Experience with target." Category-based knowledge." Gender and emotional status." Cognitive load.
Which of the following is not a behavior that research found in employees categorical knowledge of good leaders?Which of the following is not a behavior that research found in the employees' categorical knowledge of good leaders? Using an autocratic approach.
When must managers accurately identify and communicate the behavioral characteristics and results they look for in a good performance?Managers must accurately identify and communicate the behavioral characteristics and results they look for in good performance at the beginning of a review cycle.
What role do stereotypes play in the workplace quizlet?What role do stereotypes play in the workplace? Aside from the rare exception where they may open the door to a learning experience, stereotypes have no place in the workplace. job satisfaction. pay equality and advancement opportunity.
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