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person. “I trust her,” Robin says. “When she says, ‘Robin—we need to do it this way,’ I do what she says. She is always right.” Terry is very positive and promotive of the agency and complimentary of Robin. When other staff members challenge the rules or procedures of the agency, Terry is the person to whom Robin goes to for advice. But, Terry also challenges Robin to make Bluebird Care the best agency it can be.

Terry is a direct contrast to Belinda, another employee. A five-year staff member, Belinda is dogmatic and doesn’t like change, yet frequently challenges Robin and the rules of the agency. Robin describes Belinda as “a bully” and not a team player. For example, Belinda and Robin had a conflict about a rule in the agency’s procedural manual that requires staff to work every other weekend. Belinda argued that it was unfair to force staff members to work every other weekend and that other similar agencies don’t have such policies. To prove her point, Belinda obtained a competing agency’s manual that supported her position and showed it to Robin.

Robin, who does not like confrontation, was frustrated by Belinda’s aggressive conflict style. Robin brought up the issue about weekends with Terry, and Terry supported her and the way the policy was written. In the end, Belinda did not get the policy changed, but both Belinda and Robin are sure there will be more conflicts to come.

Two other key staff members are Robin’s son, Caleb, who hires and trains most of the employees, and her son- in-law, James, who answers the phone and does scheduling. Robin says as a manager James does his work in a quiet, respectful manner and seldom causes problems. In addition to handling all the hiring and training, Robin relies on Caleb to troubleshoot issues regarding client services. For both James and Caleb, the job can become stressful because it is their phones that ring when a staff member doesn’t show up to a client’s for work and they have to find someone to fill in.

Caleb also says he is working hard to instill a sense of cohesiveness among the agency’s far-flung staff and to reduce turnover with their millennial-age staff members. Caleb says while the agency’s growth is seen as positive, he worries that the caring philosophy his mother started the agency with is becoming lost.

Questions

1. Who are the followers at Bluebird Care? 2. In what way is followership related to the mission of the agency? Do Robin and her managers recognize

the importance of followership? Explain. 3. Using the roles identified in Chaleff’s follower typology (Figure 13.4), what roles do Terry, Belinda, Caleb,

and James play at the agency? 4. Using the “reversing the lens” framework (Figure 13.6), explain how Caleb and James’s characteristics

contribute to the followership outcomes at Bluebird Care. 5. Terry and Robin have a unique relationship in that they both engage in leading and following. How do

you think each of them views leadership and followership? Discuss. 6. If you were an organizational consultant, what would you suggest to Robin that could strengthen

Bluebird Care? If you were a followership coach, how would you advise Robin?

Case 13.2 Olympic Rowers

In the 1930s, rowing was the most popular sport in the country. The sport not only was physically brutal, but required inexhaustible teamwork. In an eight-man rowing shell, each member of the team has a role to fulfill based on where he sits in the boat. The movements of each rower are precisely synchronized with the movements of the others in the boat. Every rower in the shell must perform flawlessly with each and every pull

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of the oar; if one member of the crew is off, the whole team is off. Any one rower’s mistake can throw off the tempo for the boat’s thrust and jeopardize the balance and success of the boat.

In the early 1930s, rowing was a sport dominated by elite East Coast universities like Cornell, Harvard, and Princeton. However, two West Coast teams, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Washington, had an intense rivalry not only with the crews from the East Coast but with one another as well. Al Ulbrickson, the varsity crew coach at the University of Washington, had watched jealously as the California team ascended to national prominence, representing the United States in the 1932 Olympics, and was determined that his University of Washington team would be the one to represent the United States at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Germany.

Ulbrickson’s program had a number of talented rowers, including those who had rowed to win the national freshman championships in 1934. Unlike teams from the East Coast whose members’ lives were often marked by privilege and wealth, many of the boys in the University of Washington program came from poor, working- class backgrounds. They were the sons of loggers, farmers, and fishermen, and gaining a spot on the rowing team would help pay for their college education. Over the summer break these same boys would work, often in dangerous and physically taxing jobs, so they could afford to return to college in the fall.

Finding the ideal makeup of members for a successful rowing team is a complex process. A great crew is a carefully balanced mix of rowers with different physical abilities and personalities. According to Brown (2013), “Good crews are blends of personalities: someone to lead the charge, someone to hold something in reserve, someone to pick a fight, someone to make peace, someone to think through, someone to charge ahead without thinking. . . . Even after the right mixture is found, each oarsman must recognize their place in the fabric of the crew and accept the others as they are” (pp. 179–180).

To find that magic mix, Ulbrickson experimented with different combinations of rowers, putting individual rowers on different teams to see how they performed together. But it was more than just putting the right abilities together; it was finding the right chemistry. He finally did with a team of boys who “had been winnowed down by punishing competition, and in the winnowing a kind of common character had issued forth: they were all skilled, they were all tough, they were all fiercely determined, but they were also all good- hearted. Every one of them had come from humble origins or been humbled by the hard times in which they had grown up. . . . The challenges they had faced together had taught them humility—the need to subsume their individual egos for the sake of the boat as a whole—and humility was the common gateway through which they were able now to come together” (Brown, 2013, p. 241). One of those team members said when he stepped into the shell with his new teammates, he finally felt at home.

This Washington varsity team decimated the competition on the East and West Coasts, earning a spot on the U.S. Olympic team. At the Berlin Olympics, the team faced a number of challenges. One of their key oarsmen had fallen seriously ill on the transatlantic voyage to Germany and remained sick throughout the competition. There were distractions everywhere. But every time the American boys saw tension or nervousness in one another, they drew closer together as a group and talked earnestly and seriously to each other. They draped arms over one another’s shoulders and talked through their race plan. “Each of them knew a defining moment in his life was nearly at hand and no one wanted to waste it. And none wanted to waste it for the others” (Brown, 2013, p. 326).

The team defeated England in its preliminary heat, and made it to the finals. But the odds were stacked against them: They were in the worst lane in the final race, which put them at a two-length disadvantage; they experienced a delayed start because their coxswain missed the signal that the race had begun; and their sick oarsman was barely conscious. But they came from behind and triumphed, winning Olympic gold.

As Brown (2013) points out, “No other sport demands and rewards the complete abandonment of the self the way that rowing does. Great crews may have men or women of exceptional talent or strength; they may have outstanding skills . . . but they have no stars. The team effort—the perfectly synchronized flow of muscle, oars,

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boat, and water . . . the single, whole, unified, and beautiful symphony that a crew in motion becomes—is all that matters. Not the individual, not the self” (pp. 177–178).

Questions

1. In what way is this case about followership? Who were the followers? Who were the leaders? 2. The coxswain is the crew member who sits in the stern facing the bow, steers the boat, and coordinates

the power and rhythm of the rowers. In this case, is the coxswain’s role more or less important than the roles of other crew members? Explain your answer.

3. Reversing the lens emphasizes that followers can be change agents—what was the impact of followers’ characteristics on followers’ behaviors in this case? What impact do you think Ulbrickson’s perception and behaviors had on the rowers in his program?

4. How would you describe the impact of both followers and leaders on followership outcome? 5. In this case, the boys in the boat created a highly cohesive unit. Do you think highly effective followership

always results in cohesiveness? Defend your answer.

Case 13.3 Penn State Sexual Abuse Scandal

In the 46 years that Joe Paterno was head football coach of the Penn State Nittany Lions, he racked up 409 victories and was the most victorious football coach in the history of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Paterno called his brand of coaching “The Grand Experiment” because he aimed to prove that football excellence and academic integrity could coexist. Imbuing his program with the motto “Success With Honor,” Paterno was as interested in the moral character of his players as in their physical abilities, a fact borne out by the program’s unusually high graduation rates (Mahler, 2011). Over four decades, a positive mythology enveloped the program, the university, and Paterno, instilling a fervent Penn State pride in students, faculty, staff, athletes, and fans across the globe, contributing to Penn State’s reputation as one of the most highly regarded public universities in the United States.

But in 2011, a child sexual abuse scandal involving a former Penn State assistant football coach caused “The Grand Experiment” to tumble from its high perch, bringing down with it not only Coach Paterno, the university’s athletic director Tim Curley, and the storied Penn State football program, but also the university’s president, Graham B. Spanier.

The seeds of the scandal began in 1977 when Penn State’s then defensive line coach Jerry Sandusky established a nonprofit organization called The Second Mile that was described as a “group foster home devoted to helping troubled boys.” Sandusky’s position and association with Penn State gave the charity credibility, but The Second Mile ultimately proved to be a cover and conduit for Sandusky’s sexual abuse of boys. It is alleged that through The Second Mile, Sandusky was able to identify and meet many of the young men who ultimately became his victims.

Fast-forward to more than 30 years later when, in 2008, the mother of a high school freshman reported to officials that her son was sexually abused by Sandusky. Sandusky had been retired from Penn State since 1999, but continued to coach as a volunteer, working with kids through his Second Mile charity. As a result of the call, the state’s attorney general launched an investigation of Sandusky, and evidence was uncovered that this wasn’t the first time Sandusky had been alleged of committing sexual abuse. Allegations of his abuse had been cropping up since the late 1990s.

In 1998, the mother of an 11-year-old boy called Penn State University police after she learned her son had showered naked with Sandusky in the campus’s athletic locker room and that Sandusky touched the child inappropriately. At the time, Paterno, Curley, and Spanier, as well as Gary C. Schultz, senior vice president for finance and business, were all informed of the incident, and an investigation was conducted. Even though police talked with another boy who reported similar treatment, they opted to close the case. During an

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interview with university police and a representative from the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare (now known as Human Services), Sandusky said he would not shower with children again.

Two years later, in the fall of 2000, a janitor in Penn State’s Lasch football building told a coworker and supervisor that he saw Sandusky engaged in sexual activity with a boy in the assistant coach’s shower. Fearing for their jobs, neither the janitor nor his coworker filed a report; their supervisor did not file a report, either.

“They knew who Sandusky was,” Special Investigative Counsel Louis J. Freeh later said after he completed an eight-month investigation of the scandal in 2012. “They said the university would circle around it. It was like going against the president of the United States. If that’s the culture on the bottom, God help the culture at the top” (Wolverton, 2012).

In 2001, Penn State graduate assistant Mike McQueary witnessed Sandusky sexually assaulting a boy in the showers at the Lasch football building. McQueary visited Coach Paterno’s home the next morning to tell the coach what he had witnessed. Paterno, in turn, reported the incident to Athletic Director Curley. It wasn’t until 10 days later, however, that McQueary finally met with Curley and Schultz to describe what he saw.

Initially Curley, Schultz, and Spanier decided to report the incident to the Department of Public Welfare. However, two days later, Curley informed Schultz and Spanier that he had changed his mind after “talking it over with Joe” Paterno. They decided instead to offer Sandusky “professional help” and tell him to stop bringing guests to the locker room (Wolverton, 2012). No report was made to the police or the child protection agency. It was later found that in an email, Spanier told Curley he approved of the athletic director’s decision not to report the incident, calling it a “humane and reasonable way to proceed” (Wolverton, 2012).

McQueary, meanwhile, continued to work at Penn State, being promoted to an assistant football coach’s position. And over the next seven years, Sandusky reportedly kept meeting and sexually assaulting young boys.

When Sandusky was finally arrested and charged with 40 counts of sexual abuse in 2011, it was at the end of a three-year investigation launched by that mother’s 2008 phone call. The investigation not only uncovered that Sandusky sexually abused eight boys over a 15-year period, but determined that university leaders, including Spanier and Schultz, knew about the coach’s behavior and did not act. During testimony they gave during the attorney general’s investigation, these same leaders denied knowing about the 1998 and 2001 incidents; but the investigation proved through emails and other documents that university leaders did not truthfully admit what they knew about these incidents and when they knew it. As a result, Curley and Schultz were charged with perjury and failure to report what they knew of the allegations.

While Spanier called Sandusky’s behavior “troubling,” he pledged his unconditional support for both Curley and Schultz, predicting they would be exonerated (Keller, 2012). Two days later, however, Paterno and Spanier were fired by the university’s Board of Trustees, and the board hired Freeh to conduct an independent investigation of the scandal.

Eight months later, Freeh released a scathing 267-page report that detailed how and when university leaders knew about Sandusky’s behavior and stated that they failed to report repeated allegations of child sexual abuse by Sandusky. The report stated that Spanier and Paterno displayed “a total disregard for the safety and welfare of children” and hid critical facts from authorities on the alleged abuses (Wolverton, 2012).

The investigation by Freeh found emails and other documents suggesting that Spanier, Paterno, Schultz, and Curley all knew for years about the sexual nature of the accusations against Sandusky and kept these allegations under wraps. The report stated that Paterno, especially, “was an integral part of the act to conceal” (Keller, 2012). Athletic Director Curley was described in the report as “someone who followed instruction regardless of the consequences and was ‘loyal to a fault.’” One senior official called Curley Paterno’s “errand boy.” And finally, the investigation concluded that Spanier “failed in his duties as president” for “not promptly and fully advising the Board of Trustees about the 1998 and 2001 child-sexual abuse allegations against Sandusky and the subsequent grand jury investigation of him” (Keller, 2012).

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But it wasn’t just the university administrators who took fire. The report also cited the university’s Board of Trustees for failing “to exercise its oversight,” stating “the Board did not create a ‘tone at the top’ environment wherein Sandusky and other senior university officials believed they were accountable to it.” Ultimately, Freeh’s report concluded that the reputations of the university and its exalted football program were “more important to its leaders than the safety and welfare of young children” (Keller, 2012).

Joe Paterno died in January 2012. Six months later, Sandusky, the assistant coach he protected, was convicted of 45 counts of child sexual abuse and sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison. Former Penn State officials Curley, Schultz, and Spanier were all sentenced to jail time for failing to alert authorities of the allegations against Sandusky, allowing him to continue molesting boys for years.

A month after Sandusky’s conviction and 10 days after Freeh’s report was released, a much-beloved 7-foot, 900-pound bronze statue of Paterno was removed from its pedestal outside Penn State’s Beaver Stadium, providing symbolic evidence of the failure of Paterno’s “Success With Honor” motto and the public’s faith in Penn State’s program.

Questions

1. How would you describe the followership at Penn State? Whom would you identify as the followers? Who are the leaders?

2. Using Kelley’s typology, how would you describe the follower styles for Schultz and Curley? What about McQueary?

3. How did followers in this case act in ways that contribute to the power of destructive leaders and their goals? What was the debilitating impact their actions had on the organization?

4. Based on Lipman-Blumen’s psychological factors that contribute to harmful leadership (Table 13.3), explain why those who could have reported Sandusky’s behaviors chose not to.

5. Based on the outcome, where did Paterno’s intentions go wrong? In what ways could followers have changed the moral climate at Penn State?

6. In the end, who carries the burden of responsibility regarding the failure of Paterno’s program—the leaders or the followers? Defend your answer.

Leadership Instrument

As discussed earlier in this chapter, Kelley (1992) developed a typology that categorized followers into one of five styles (exemplary, alienated, conformist, passive, and pragmatist) based on two axes (independent thinking and active engagement). These different dimensions of followership became the basis for Kelley’s Followership Questionnaire, a survey that allows followership style to be determined through an empirical approach, rather than through observation.

Followership Questionnaire

Purpose: The purpose of this questionnaire is to learn about your style as a follower.

Instructions: Think of a specific leader–follower situation where you were in the role of follower. For each statement, please use the following scale to indicate the extent to which the statement describes you and your behavior in this situation.

Key: 0 = Rarely 1 = Almost rarely 2 = Seldom 3 = Occasionally 4 = More often than not 5 = Often 6 = Almost always

1. Does your work help you fulfill some societal goal or personal dream that is important to you?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

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2. Are your personal work goals aligned with the organization’s priority goals?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

3. Are you highly committed to and energized by your work and organization, giving them your best ideas and performance?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

4. Does your enthusiasm also spread to and energize your coworkers? 0 1 2 3 4 5 6

5. Instead of waiting for or merely accepting what the leader tells you, do you personally identify which organizational activities are most critical for achieving the organization’s priority goals?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

6. Do you actively develop a distinctive competence in those critical activities so that you become more valuable to the leader and the organization?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

7. When starting a new job or assignment, do you promptly build a record of successes in tasks that are important to the leader?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

8. Can the leader give you a difficult assignment without the benefit of much supervision, knowing that you will meet your deadline with highest-quality work and that you will “fill in the cracks” if need be?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

9. Do you take the initiative to seek out and successfully complete assignments that go above and beyond your job?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

10. When you are not the leader of a group project, do you still contribute at a high level, often doing more than your share?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

11. Do you independently think up and champion new ideas that will contribute significantly to the leader’s or the organization’s goals?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

12. Do you try to solve the tough problems (technical or organizational), rather than look to the leader to do it for you?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

13. Do you help out other coworkers, making them look good, even when you don’t get any credit?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

14. Do you help the leader or group see both the upside potential and downside risks of ideas or plans, playing the devil’s advocate if need be?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

15. Do you understand the leader’s needs, goals, and constraints, and work hard to help meet them?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

16. Do you actively and honestly own up to your strengths and weaknesses rather than put off evaluation?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

17. Do you make a habit of internally questioning the wisdom of the leader’s decision rather than just doing what you are told?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

18. When the leader asks you to do something that runs contrary to your professional or personal preferences, do you say “no” rather than “yes”?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

19. Do you act on your own ethical standards rather than the leader’s or the group’s standards?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

20. Do you assert your views on important issues, even though it might mean conflict with your group or reprisals from the leader?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

Source: Excerpts from Kelley, Robert E. (1992). The Power of Followership: How to Create Leaders People Want to Follow and Followers Who

Lead Themselves. New York: Doubleday.

Scoring

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The Followership Questionnaire measures your style as a follower based on two dimensions of followership: independent thinking and active engagement. Your responses indicate the degree to which you are an independent thinker and actively engaged in your follower role. Score the questionnaire by doing the following. Your scores will classify you as being primarily one of the five styles: exemplary, alienated, conformist, pragmatist, or passive.

1. Independent Thinking Score: Sum of questions 1, 5, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20 2. Active Engagement Score: Sum of questions 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, and 15

Exemplary Followership Style: If you scored high (above 40) on both independent thinking and active engagement, your followership style is categorized as exemplary.

Alienated Followership Style: If you scored high (above 40) on independent thinking and low (below 20) on active engagement, your followership style is categorized as alienated.

Conformist Followership Style: If you scored low (below 20) on independent thinking and high (above 40) on active engagement, your followership style is categorized as conformist.

Pragmatist Followership Style: If you scored in the middle range (from 20 to 40) on both independent thinking and active engagement, your followership style is categorized as pragmatist.

Passive Followership Style: If you scored low (below 20) on both independent thinking and active engagement, your followership style is categorized as passive.

Followership Style Independent Thinking Score Active Engagement Score

EXEMPLARY High High

ALIENATED High Low

CONFORMIST Low High

PRAGMATIST Middling Middling

PASSIVE Low Low

Source: Adapted from Kelley, Robert E. (1992). The Power of Followership: How to Create Leaders People Want to Follow and Followers Who

Lead Themselves. New York: Doubleday.

Scoring Interpretation

What do the different styles mean? How should you interpret your style? The followership styles characterize how you carry out the followership role, not who you are as a person. At any point in time, or under different circumstances, you may use one followership pattern rather than another.

Exemplary Follower

Exemplary followers score high in both independent thinking and active engagement. They exhibit independent, critical thinking, separate from the group or leader. They are actively engaged, using their talents for the benefit of the organization, even when confronted with bureaucracy or other noncontributing members. Up to 35% of people are categorized as exemplary followers.

Alienated Follower

Alienated followers score high in independent thinking but low in active engagement. This means that they think independently and critically, but are not active in carrying out the role of a follower. They might disengage from the group at times and may view themselves as victims who have received unfair treatment. Approximately 15%–25% of people are categorized as alienated followers.

Conformist Follower

Conformist followers often say “yes” when they really want to say “no.” Low in independent thinking and high in active engagement, they willingly take orders and are eager to please others. They believe that the leader’s position of power entitles the leader to followers’ obedience. They do not question the social order and find comfort in structure. Approximately 20%–30% of people are categorized as conformist followers.

Pragmatist Follower

With independent thinking and active engagement styles that fall between high and low, pragmatic followers are most comfortable in the middle of the road and tend to adhere to a motto of “better safe than sorry.” They will question a leader’s decisions, but not too often or too openly. They perform required tasks, but seldom do more than is asked or expected. Approximately 25%–35% of people are categorized as pragmatist followers.

Passive Follower

With low independent thinking and low active engagement behaviors, passive followers are the opposite of exemplary followers, looking to the leader to do their thinking for them. They do not carry out their assignments with enthusiasm and lack initiative and a sense of responsibility. Approximately 5%–10% of people are categorized as passive followers.

Source: Excerpts from Kelley, Robert E. (1992). The Power of Followership: How to Create Leaders People Want to Follow and

Followers Who Lead Themselves. New York: Doubleday.

Summary

Leadership requires followership, and without understanding what the act of following entails, it is difficult to fully understand leaders and leadership. Therefore, the focus in this chapter is on followership and the central role followers play in the leadership process.

In recent years, followership has received increased attention as a legitimate and significant area of leadership study. Followership is defined as a process whereby an individual or individuals accept the influence of others to accomplish a common goal. It involves a power differential between the follower and the leader. From a social constructivist perspective, followership emerges from communication between leaders and followers and involves the relational process of people exerting influence and others responding to that influence.

Early research on followership resulted in a series of typologies that differentiate the roles followers can play. The primary types of follower roles identified are active–engaged, independent–assertive, submissive–compliant, and supportive–conforming.

The development of these typologies provides a starting point for building theory on followership. Based on a systematic analysis of the research literature, Uhl-Bien and her colleagues (2014) introduced a broad theory of followership comprising the characteristics, behaviors, and outcomes of followers and leaders acting in relation to each other. Furthermore, these researchers proposed two ways of theorizing about followership: (1) reversing the lens, which addresses followers in the opposite way they have been studied in most prior leadership research, and (2) the leadership co-created process, which conceptualizes followership as a give-and-

take process in which individuals’ following behaviors and leading behaviors interact with each other to create leadership and its resulting outcomes.

Work by Carsten and colleagues (2014) also advanced several positive facets of followership—followers get the job done, work in the best interest of the organization’s mission, challenge leaders, support the leader, and learn from leaders.

In addition to having a positive impact, there is another, darker side to followership. Followers can play ineffective, and even harmful, roles. Lipman-Blumen (2005) identified a series of psychological factors of followers that contribute to harmful, dysfunctional leadership. These factors include people’s need for reassuring authority figures; need for security and certainty; need to feel chosen or special; need for membership in the human community; fear of ostracism, isolation, and social death; and fear of powerlessness to challenge a bad leader. The emergence of these factors occurs as a result of people’s needs to find safety to feel unique and to be included in community.

The existing followership literature has several strengths and certain limitations. On the positive side, the most recent literature gives recognition to followership as an integral part of the leadership equation and elevates it considerably, giving it equal footing with leadership. Second, it forces us to take leadership off its pedestal and replace it with followership. Third, it provides a useful set of basic prescriptions for what a follower should or should not do in order to be an effective follower.

On the negative side, very little methodical research has been conducted on the process of followership, which makes it difficult to theorize about followership’s role in groups, organizations, and the community. Furthermore, the descriptive research that has been conducted on followership is primarily anecdotal and observational. Third, the world’s pervasive emphasis on and glorification of leadership may be so ingrained that the study of followership will remain constrained and never flourish. Fourth, followership research has not fully addressed the question “Why follow?” Finally, there has been little research on when and/or how patterns of followership are beneficial or detrimental.

In summary, the demand in society for effective, principled followers is growing and along with it a strong need for research-based theories of the process of followership. Until more research is done on the intricacies of followership, our understanding of leadership will be incomplete.

Descriptions of Images and Figures Back to Figure

The horizontal axis lists passivity on the left and activity on the right, and the vertical axis lists dominance or controlling at the top and submission or being controlled at the bottom. The four types of followers are as follows.

Compulsive: Passivity and Dominance.

Impulsive: Activity and Dominance.

Withdraw: Passivity and Submission.

Masochistic: Activity and Submission.

Back to Figure

The horizontal axis lists passive on the left and active on the right, and the vertical axis lists independent, critical thinking at the top and dependent, uncritical thinking at the bottom. The five types of followers are as follows.

Alienated followers: Passive and Independent, Critical Thinking.

Exemplary followers: Active and Independent, Critical Thinking.

Passive followers: Passive and Dependent Uncritical Thinking.

Conformist followers: Active and Dependent Uncritical Thinking.

Pragmatist followers: Center of the axes. Back to Figure

The horizontal axis lists low challenge on the left and high challenge on the right, and the vertical axis lists low support at the top and high support at the bottom. The four types of followers are as follows.

Implementer: Low Challenge and High Support.

Partner: High Challenge and High Support.

Resource: Low Challenge and Low Support.

Individualist: High Challenge and Low Support.

14 GENDER AND LEADERSHIP

Stefanie Simon Crystal L. Hoyt

Women are significantly underrepresented in major leadership positions. The barriers women encounter on their leadership journey have been dubbed the leadership labyrinth. Removing these barriers will help ensure equal opportunity, access to the greatest talent pool, and diversity, which have been linked to organizational success.

DESCRIPTION While academic researchers ignored issues related to gender and leadership until the 1970s (Chemers, 1997), the increasing numbers of women in leadership positions and women in academia brought about by dramatic changes in American society have fueled the now robust scholarly interest in the study of leadership and gender.

Scholars started out asking, “Can women lead?”—a question that is now moot. In addition to the increasing presence of women in corporate and political leadership roles, we can point to highly effective leaders who are women, including former prime minister Benazir Bhutto (Pakistan), former president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (Liberia), and former prime minster Indira Gandhi (India), and current world leaders such as Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Prime Minister Sanna Marin of Finland, and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand (featured in Case Study 14.3). Beyond politics, there are many examples of highly effective female leaders including YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki, Anthem’s CEO Gail Boudreaux, General Motors Company’s CEO Mary Barra, retired four-star general Ann E. Dunwoody, and U.S. Supreme Court justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The primary research questions now—“Do men and women lead differently?” and “Are men more effective leaders than women?”—are often subsumed under a larger question: “Why are women underrepresented in elite leadership roles?” This chapter explores empirical evidence related to these issues of gender and leadership by discussing the gender gap in leadership and prominent explanations for it, and by addressing approaches to promoting women in leadership.

The Glass Ceiling Turned Labyrinth

Evidence of the Leadership Labyrinth

Although the gender gap in leadership has improved significantly in recent decades, there is still a long way to go. Women now earn 57% of the bachelor’s degrees, 60% of the master’s degrees, and 53% of the doctoral degrees acquired each year in the United States (National Center for Education Statistics, 2018), and as of December 2019 (prior to the COVID-19 pandemic), women made up more than half of the U.S. labor force (50.03%; Kelly, 2020). However, women are still underrepresented in the upper echelons of America’s corporations and political system. Women represent only 5.8% of S&P 500 CEOs and hold only 21.2% of S&P 500 board seats (Catalyst, 2020). On the political front, 2018 was a noteworthy year for women in U.S. politics, particularly for women of color in the House of Representatives (Warner, Ellmann, & Boesch, 2018). In addition, Senator Kamala Harris, a daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, became the first woman of color selected as a U.S. vice presidential candidate on the Democratic Party ticket. However, women currently occupy

just 127 of the 535 seats in the U.S. Congress (26% in the Senate and 23.2% in the House); women of color occupy 48 seats (Center for American Women and Politics, 2020a, 2020b). As of June 2020, the United States ranked 83 out of 193 countries in women’s representation in national legislatures or parliaments (Inter- Parliamentary Union, 2020).

The invisible barrier preventing women from ascending into elite leadership positions was initially dubbed the glass ceiling, a term introduced into the American vernacular by two Wall Street Journal reporters in 1986 (Hymowitz & Schellhardt, 1986). Even in female-dominated occupations, women face the glass ceiling, whereas white men appear to ride a glass escalator to the top leadership positions (Maume, 1999; C. Williams, 1992, 1995). Eagly and Carli (2007) identified limitations with the glass ceiling metaphor, including that it implies that everyone has equal access to lower positions until all women hit this single, invisible, and impassable barrier. They put forward an alternative image: a leadership labyrinth, conveying the impression of a journey riddled with challenges all along the way—not just near the top—that can be and has been successfully navigated by women. Related, Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg proffered the metaphor of a jungle gym in her book Lean In (2013).

Understanding the Labyrinth

The gender gap in leadership is a global phenomenon whereby women are disproportionately concentrated in lower-level and lower-authority leadership positions compared to men (Powell & Graves, 2003). Discussions of women’s underrepresentation in high-level leadership positions generally revolve around three types of explanations (Figure 14.1). The first set of explanations highlights differences in women’s and men’s investments in human capital. The next category of explanations considers gender differences between women and men. The final type of explanation focuses on prejudice and discrimination against female leaders.

Human Capital Differences.

One prominent set of explanations for the labyrinth is that women have less human capital investment in education, training, and work experience than men (Eagly & Carli, 2004, 2007). This supposed lack of human capital is said to result in a dearth of qualified women, sometimes called a “pipeline problem.” However, a closer look at the numbers reveals that women are indeed in the pipeline, but that the pipeline is leaking. As already discussed, women are obtaining undergraduate degrees at a far higher rate than men, and women are earning professional and doctoral degrees at a rate greater or nearly equal to that of men, but women are still vastly underrepresented in top leadership positions. In the domain of law, women earn 50% of all law degrees and make up 46% of associates, but they make up only 22.7% of partners (American Bar Association, 2019). And even though women represent about 40% of those graduating with MBAs (Hess, 2019), their representation in the upper echelons of American business pales in comparison.