Female Leadership Advantage in Teams: A Situational Perspective

Abstract

This study contributes to the debate about a female leadership advantage by evaluating differences in team states (i.e., cohesion, collective efficacy, and a shared mental model) among teams led by women and those led by men. Drawing on the burgeoning work on relational leadership practices, the study contextualizes the female leadership advantage argument by proposing that under conditions of high situational ambiguity (i.e., high functional diversity and task interdependence), female leaders will bring about more favorable team states than male leaders because such team conditions elicit and require the relational skills that women appear more likely to possess. I aggregated survey responses from the members of 82 cross-functional innovation teams in 29 organizations at the team-level. The findings from hierarchical linear modeling analyses suggest that, as team leaders, women are more likely than men are to facilitate cohesion on teams with more functional diversity and to facilitate collective efficacy and shared mental models on teams with high task interdependence. These results contextualize the existence of a female leadership advantage. They also underscore the potential value of leaders’ relational adaptability for the performance of functionally diverse and interdependent teams.