It’s a man’s world! the role of political ideology in the early stages of leader recruitment

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2020.10.017Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Conservatives describe a leadership position less positively to a female candidate.

  • Liberals do not demonstrate such gender bias.

  • Conservatives experience greater anxiety when communicating with female candidates.

  • Anxious decision makers describe the position less positively to candidates.

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated the impact of political ideology on a wide variety of psychological and behavioral processes. Contributing to this research, we examine the effect of organizational decision makers’ political ideology and job candidates’ gender on how the decision makers communicate information about leadership positions to the candidate. In five studies, we demonstrate that decision makers who are more conservative exhibit gender bias by providing a female (versus male) candidate with a less positive description of a leadership position, an effect driven by the decision makers’ felt anxiety. We further show that making information on women’s success in leadership positions salient diminishes the effect of political ideology insofar as both more and less conservative decision makers will exhibit similar levels of positivity when communicating with a prospective female candidate. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.

Introduction

The gender leadership gap refers to the underrepresentation of women relative to men in upper leadership positions across many industries. In the private sector, for example, women occupy only 29% of senior-level executive positions despite comprising 48% of the entire private sector workforce (The American Association of University Women, 2016). The most common explanation for this gap is discrimination: women are denied or not chosen for leadership positions because of their gender rather than their skillset (e.g., Okimoto and Brescoll, 2010, Rudman et al., 2012). While discrimination is undoubtedly an empirically well-supported explanation for the leadership gap, another potential contributor may be a more subtle form of prejudice that results in women simply not being willing to pursue these positions. This subtle form of prejudice has been shown to manifest in how managers treat their female (vs. male) subordinates. This treatment includes offering women less challenging work assignments than men, less training and development, less career encouragement, and less support for a work–life balance—all of which can ultimately negatively affect women’s leadership aspirations (Fritz and Van Knippenberg, 2018, Hoobler et al., 2013).

In this paper, we propose another context in which women might experience a subtle form of prejudice when organizational managers or decision makers dissuade them from pursuing leadership positions: the pre-recruitment communication stage. Pre-recruitment communications with prospective employees are common and tend to be informal. A Society for Human Resource Management (2015) survey reveals that approximately 82% of U.S. organizations use social media platforms (e.g., LinkedIn) to contact passive candidates who might otherwise not consider applying, and 71% employ social media to target candidates with specific sets of skills. In addition, large, global companies (such as GE, Hitachi, and IBM) use informal pre-recruitment communications to actively target women for leadership positions (Boyden, 2012, Dyrchs and Strack, 2012). Despite the benefits of such practices, any gender bias that might manifest itself during the pre-recruitment communication with prospective employees can be consequential. In fact, we propose that decision makers may subtly discourage women from pursuing leadership positions by presenting these positions less positively in their informal communications with women than with men.

We certainly do not suggest that women vying for or in leadership positions face gender bias from every decision maker they encounter in an organization. In fact, past research shows that characteristics of evaluators affect their perceptions of female leadership effectiveness and their suitability for leadership roles. This research finds, for example, that evaluators’ marriage structure (Desai, Chugh, & Brief, 2014), gender role attitudes (e.g., Hoyt and Burnette, 2013, Looney et al., 2004), social dominance orientation (e.g., Hoyt & Simon, 2016), and degree of masculinity (vs. sensitivity) (Johnson, Murphy, Zewdie, & Reichard, 2008) can affect prejudicial attitudes toward a female leader. Contributing to this body of work, we examine another individual characteristic of the evaluator—his or her political ideology—that might affect prejudicial attitudes toward women being considered for leadership positions.

We focus on political ideology because this individual characteristic predicts favoring of status quo (Jost, Federico, & Napier, 2009), which, for organizational leadership positions, might mean favoring men over women. In fact, recent studies have linked the political ideology of managers to a number of important decisions that affect the outcomes for employees and stakeholders, specifically around issues associated with gender and diversity in the workplace. This work has demonstrated the unique effect of political ideology above and beyond the effects of a number of theoretically relevant individual-, group-, and organizational-level factors. For example, as compared to liberals, conservative managers have been shown to allocate greater bonuses to men than to women (Briscoe & Joshi, 2017), to be less likely to achieve gender parity in promotion rates (Carnahan & Greenwood, 2017), and to engage to a lesser degree in corporate social responsibility practices aimed at supporting marginalized individuals outside the company (Briscoe et al., 2013, Gupta et al., 2017). Thus, the implications of managers’ political ideologies are critical for those who are on the receiving end of those decisions, since the former have considerable leeway in determining employee outcomes through their subjective evaluations (Briscoe and Joshi, 2017, Castilla, 2011, Hultin and Szulkin, 1999).

In the present research, we focus on the impact of decision makers’ political ideology on gender bias—favoring men over women—in pre-recruitment communications with candidates for leadership positions. Relying on the connection between political ideology and beliefs regarding the status quo (Jost, Nosek, & Gosling, 2008), we argue that when conservative decision makers communicate about leadership positions with female versus male candidates, their gender bias will manifest in less positive descriptions of the leadership positions. We further explore anxiety as the underlying mechanism to explain why more conservative (vs. less conservative) decision makers will display gender bias in their communication early in the recruitment process (see Fig. 1). Finally, we propose a condition (inclusion of information that justifies the presence of female leaders and emphasizes their respective success) under which the gender bias effect is weakened, such that both more and less conservative decision makers communicate with a prospective female leadership candidate in a similar manner.

Our research makes two important contributions. First, we focus on the content of communications with prospective candidates early in the recruitment process. Given that women have been consistently underrepresented in organizational leadership positions for the past 60 years (e.g., Catalyst, 2019), it is essential to understand the nature of gender bias and its manifestations. The content of communications used in recruitment may have a critical influence on women’s interest in a position (Noguchi, 2015). Therefore, we focus on personalized communications with potential candidates for leadership positions to examine whether decision makers entice women to a lesser degree than men to pursue these positions by describing the positions less positively. While existing research explores the influence of biased word choices on candidates’ likelihood of applying for a position (e.g., Gaucher et al., 2011, Highhouse et al., 1999), we examine a factor that may lead to the gender bias in decision makers’ communications with potential candidates in the first place.

Second, we contribute to the scant but emerging research on the role of political ideology in the workplace (e.g., Briscoe et al., 2013, Briscoe and Joshi, 2017, Carnahan and Greenwood, 2017, Gupta et al., 2017), specifically as it relates to the manifestation of bias against female candidates for leadership positions. Furthermore, by focusing on the feelings of anxiety decision makers experience when communicating with a candidate, we shed further light on the mechanism that explains the link between political ideology and gender bias. In doing so, we also advance our understanding of gender bias in the selection or evaluation of leaders by moving beyond other previous explanations for gender bias in leadership research (e.g., homophily: Ibarra, 1993; leadership categorization theory: Lord, Foti, & De Vader, 1984; role congruity theory: Eagly & Karau, 2002).

Section snippets

The effect of decision Maker’s political ideology on gender bias in leadership

Political ideology is defined as “an interrelated set of attitudes and values about the proper goals for society and how they should be achieved” (Tedin, 1987, p. 65). Originating at the cusp of the French Revolution (Bobbio, 1996), the term political ideology is a continuum along which people range from liberal (or left-wing) to conservative (or right-wing).1

Political ideology and anxiety as an emotional reaction to female candidates for a leadership position

Next, we theorize about the psychological mechanism driving the interactive relationship between a decision maker’s conservative ideology and the gender of a job candidate for a leadership position. We argue that more conservative individuals may regard a woman in a leadership position as a threat to the status quo, a view that triggers an affective reaction in the form of anxiety—a reaction aimed at eliminating the threat.

Before delineating the link between threat and anxiety, it is important

Overview of the studies

We formulated our hypotheses around the communication that often takes place when a decision maker reaches out to a candidate with the aim of providing more information about a position. In our studies, we operationalize the gender bias in the content of communications by measuring how positively the decision maker describes the leadership position to a prospective job candidate in writing. Our decision to operationalize gender bias in this way is based on the fact that referrals and candidate

Study 1: Political ideology and gender bias in hiring

The goal of Study 1 was to demonstrate in an experimental setting that the more (as opposed to less) conservative participants would describe a leadership position more positively to a male than to a female candidate. To measure our dependent variable, we provided participants with four positively and four negatively valenced job attributes (i.e., pieces of information about the position) that they could use in their description of the leadership position. Specifically, we focused on the total

Study 2: Candidates’ gender, decision makers’ political Ideology, and felt anxiety when interacting with the candidate

In Study 2, we attempted to examine whether felt anxiety explains why more conservative decision makers show gender bias when describing a leadership position to a female candidate. To do this, we sought to isolate the causal effect by manipulating the candidate’s gender and the decision maker’s political ideology. In so doing, we examined whether more conservative decision makers experience greater anxiety when interacting with a female (versus male) candidate (Hypothesis 2).

Study 3: Felt anxiety when interacting with a candidate and the position description

In Study 3, we sought to provide empirical evidence for the mediating role of decision makers’ felt anxiety when interacting with a candidate on the overall positivity of the position description by manipulating felt anxiety (Hypothesis 3).

Study 4: Testing the entire theoretical model

In Study 4, we tested the entire hypothesized model and sought to examine whether decision makers’ political ideology moderated the indirect effect of a candidate’s gender on the overall positivity of the description of the position via felt anxiety (Hypothesis 4). In particular, to increase the realism of our dependent variable, we asked participants to craft an email using some or all of the same eight pieces of information (rather than asking them to simply choose pieces of information they

Study 5: Intervention to reduce gender bias

The results of Studies 1–4 demonstrated that more conservative participants in the role of a decision maker presented a leadership position more positively to a male than to a female candidate and also showed how this gender bias against women applying for leadership positions might unfold. Relying on our theoretical arguments about the role of the threat to status quo, we now examine one way in which this subtle form of discrimination might be prevented.

As we argued earlier, for psychological

General discussion

Our research sheds light on how gender bias might manifest in the earlier stages of the hiring process, during pre-recruitment communication about leadership positions. Across five studies, we found that female (vs. male) candidates were more likely to receive a less positive (or less appealing) description of the position from more conservative decision makers than from less conservative ones, an effect mediated by the felt anxiety of the decision makers if they were to interact with that

Conclusion

Our findings point to another example of how gender bias can manifest itself in the 21st century. Although we see fewer examples of blatant gender discrimination today as compared to even 30 years ago, its subtle cousin, gender bias, persists. Indeed, due to its unostentatious nature, gender bias could potentially be as dangerous (if not more) than gender discrimination. It is our hope that, by bringing attention to one way in which gender bias may be manifested, it can eventually be eradicated.

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