Korean Women Leaders’ Resistance to Their Token Status in the Organization

Abstract

Women leaders in Korea are tokens because there are only a few women taking leadership positions in almost all sectors. We found from previous research on women leaders that due to their token status in organizations, many of them attempted to assimilate to meet men’s norms and expectations. However, we also found that a few women leaders managed to resist in their own way. In this chapter, we pay particular attention to women leaders’ resistance to their token status in the organization through rejecting dominant norms and practices, going their own way, and creating new norms, by reanalyzing 111 women leaders’ narratives collected from research on women leaders in the business sector in the past few years. To that end, after reviewing the literature on tokenism theory and resistance as theoretical backgrounds, we show how women leaders use resistance as a coping strategy to create opportunities as leaders in the organization and role models for women in the leadership pipeline. Based on the study findings, we provide implications for HRD research and practice.