Through the Lens of a Millennial: Opening the Aperture of Millennials’ Views of Leaders

Abstract

As more women joined the workforce in the last few decades, scholars have continued to research why women do not occupy more senior levels of leadership. While many variables have been researched, a pervasive theory is that women are expected to act in communal ways, but leadership is described as agentic; typically attributed to male behaviors. Namely, women in more senior roles must display male, agentic behaviors to be perceived as a credible leader, yet still maintain their communal traits to avoid being perceived as duplicitous. With more females in the workplace, acting as new exemplars for the millennial workforce, have the views of leadership changed to be less agentic? This quantitative study investigated; whether male millennials in the workforce maintain as agentic a view of leadership as their predecessors, whether female millennials in the workforce maintain as agentic a view of leadership as their predecessors, and whether the presence of women in leadership roles has influenced leadership behaviors in either gender. In this study, millennials are surveyed regarding the most important leadership characteristics and how gender undulates through the perceived effectiveness. The researchers found that leadership descriptors are more gender-agnostic, influencing a broader view of how leadership is seen across both genders. The implications for this finding are that millennials are softening the more traditional view of agentic leadership and expanding leadership to include more communal traits.