Women’s Participation in Entrepreneurial and Political Leadership: The Importance of Culturally Endorsed Implicit Leadership Theories

Abstract

This paper explores how globally endorsed leadership behaviors affect women’s involvement in leadership by empirically examining the impact of Project GLOBE’s culturally endorsed implicit leadership theories on a sample of female business and political leaders. The study examines two continuous dependent variables provided by the World Bank: Female Seats in National Parliaments (%) and Self-employed Females (% of Total Self-employment). Regression analysis was used to test the viability of the culturally endorsed implicit leadership theories as possible predictors of women’s participation in leadership. The results indicate that charismatic leadership and self-protective leadership are predictors of women’s leadership participation but in different ways; the former has a positive effect for participation in both leadership (political and business) contexts and the latter has a negative effect only on political leadership participation.