Gender and leadership in work groups: Six alternative models

Abstract

Interest in understanding the dynamics of gender and leadership has blossomed in recent years as occupations and organizations have become less sex-segregated. Much of the work in this area has failed to draw on the wealth of theoretical work that addresses the dynamics of gender in social interaction. The aim of this article is to review several theoretical traditions within the gender literature that have social psychological implications for emergent status structures for groups of varying sex compositions over time. Six models are developed with competing predictions for leadership emergence and status structures, and existing evidence is compared with model predictions. The article concludes by noting that greater understanding can be reached by performing competitive tests of a variety of models, such as the ones presented in this article, and doing so by studying groups over time.