Gender and Communication at Work

Marilyn J. Davidson, Mary Barrett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754638407
• eBook ISBN: 9781317130833
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Written by leading researchers from four continents, this book offers a broad and contemporary assessment of the ways in which gender affects workplace communication and how this in turn influences people's choices, training, opportunities and career development. A range of work situations are considered (including communication within the normal routine, in a crisis or under pressure, and during those occasions important for career development) and examples are sourced from a variety of contexts (including international business, leadership, service work, and computer-mediated communication). Gender and Communication at Work includes a diversity of theoretical perspectives in order to most successfully map the range of communication strategies, identities and roles which impact upon and are influenced by gender at work.

Chapter 1

Gender and Communication at Work: An Introduction

Mary Barrett and Marilyn J. Davidson

Introduction

The last three to four decades have seen a rapid increase in numbers of women in the workplace worldwide, with more women also entering managerial ranks. However, despite legislation in many countries aimed at furthering women’s capacities to move to the top of their organizations, the phenomenon of the ‘glass ceiling’ persists (Davidson and Burke, 2004; Ryan and Haslam, 2005). Public policy documents, academic research and popular books advocating government, industry and organization-level policy initiatives to facilitate women’s advancement continue to be published. So-called ‘business case’ arguments, that is, arguments to the effect that organizations that fail to acknowledge and use the skills of all members of their workforce will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage, seem to have had much less effect than similar arguments for other kinds of business and organizational change. Nevertheless, over the past decade or so, there has been a shift from equal opportunities (EO) initiatives aimed at reducing discrimination in organizations to the phenomenon of managing diversity in the workplace (Cassell, 1997; Liff and Wajcman, 1996). Failure of 1980s policies and practices was often linked to degrees of ‘backlash’ and resistance from majority groups (often white males) who felt excluded and the unrealistic expectations placed on employees of different gender and backgrounds (Davidson and Burke, 2000). Conversely, the concept of managing diversity both values and harnesses the talents of individual differences. These differences, in turn, transform the varying sets of skills that every employee possesses into a business advantage. According to Davidson and Fielden (2003: xxii):

Through the fostering of difference, team creativity, innovation and problem-solving can often be enhanced. The focus is, therefore, much more on the individual rather than the group. Having a diverse workforce not only enables organizations to understand and meet customer demand better, but also helps attract investors and clients, as well as reduce the costs associated with discrimination.

Evidence from a variety of fields suggests that communication issues contribute to the creation of barriers to women’s advancement in organizations or, at least, to a variety of misunderstandings between women and men at work. Differences between men’s and women’s communication have been part of the academic literature in linguistics for more than two decades. Some of the findings have also entered the popular ‘battle of the sexes’ management literature, especially through books such as Deborah Tannen’s (1990) You Just Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation and (1994) Talking from 9 to 5, Marian Woodall’s (1990) How to Talk so Men Will Listen, and John Gray’s (1992) Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars.

The popularity of these books and many others like them suggests their findings are intuitively attractive to many women worldwide. Many are based on excellent research. Deborah Tannen, for example, is a linguistics scholar and researcher of international repute, as well as an author of a number of bestsellers in the popular ‘gender wars at work’ arena. However, much of the original research on which the ‘communication advice’ literature is based was done in the United States. Accordingly, such work typically recommends directness, forcefulness and simplicity to produce effective communication, and this has been criticized as being based on implicit models of communication that are male and American (for example Woodall, 1990). Moreover, since the research data was gathered more than a decade ago, it is important to consider how much resonance these ideas have with women and workplaces now. Certainly, they were very much based on the EO model of assimilation rather than the diversity model, whereby communication differences were to be valued and incorporated as part of a diverse organizational culture. As well, findings and advice based on – and addressed to – the experience and interests of white, ‘corporate’ women in conventional office settings, will not necessarily address the gender-related aspects of ‘new’ workplaces, such as teleworking, various forms of e-business and computer-mediated communication, non-managerial work, or special work environments such as emergency call centres.

Globalization and the rise of the service sector, with its emphasis on people skills, have both been touted as factors creating the work environments of the future. Both phenomena have been argued to create work situations requiring a high level of communication skills and, indeed, the empathetic styles of communication that have been popularly thought to be more ‘natural’ for women. As a result, it is often held (for example, Wajcman, 1999) that women’s ways of working and women’s leadership styles, especially as these relate to communication, ought to further women’s advancement at work and even persuade men to adopt more ‘female’ approaches to communication, management and leadership. This would follow as part of a more general reliance on participative management that, in turn, has been seen as characteristic of ‘female’ approaches to leadership, as described by authors such as Rosener (1990). On the other side, however, more critical views point to the emotional labour demands of some ‘remote’ and service sector work, and the risks of renewed stereotyping and undervaluing of women at work through the focus on ‘naturally female’ skills (for example, Brody and Hall, 2000; Hess et al., 2000).

The complexity and range of gender issues in workplace communication is also reflected in the paucity of serious and comprehensive ‘handbook’ material directed at people such as human resource managers who have a professional interest in communication and gender issues at work. Many major ‘gender and work’ texts deal only minimally with communication issues and, conversely, texts on organizational communication usually deal only minimally with gender. For example, Powell’s (1999) Handbook of Gender and Work is comprehensive in its treatment of a range of work problems for women and men, but includes little discussion of communication issues. Jablin and Putnam’s (2001) The New Handbook of Organizational Communication: Advances in Theory, Research, and Methods deals with gender issues on only about 30 pages out of a hefty 911 pages in the volume as a whole.

This book brings together current debates and findings around these issues, and is divided into five parts:

• gender and communication situations in the employment lifespan;

• gender, communication and organizational boundaries: linkages and violations;

• gender and communication channels in special workplace environments;

• communicating to get things done; and

• the future: gender and computer-mediated communication at work.

Gender and Communication Situations in the Employment Lifespan

The chapters in the first part of the book review current research concerning the communication experience of men and women in relation to three different situations or events during the employment lifespan: the employment interview; employment training, especially training in communication and leadership skills; and promotion. These three situations, it would be agreed, are critical phases or events in employment and crucial both to securing basic job security and achieving advancement at work. Gender issues as they relate to the employment relationship are, of course, not new research concerns. The academic and professional literature surrounding equal employment opportunity and affirmative action, and the more recent diversity movement have long focused on the potential for systemic and non-systemic bias in recruitment and selection processes, development opportunities including training for organizational leadership, and promotion processes (for example, Smith, 2003). Ways in which these situations and opportunities are presented and framed at individual, organizational and societal levels can all mitigate against women’s opportunities for getting ahead at work. The focus in terms of remedial action has typically been on organizational policies and strategies that aim to ensure that selection processes and later work opportunities are based on merit. In more complex discussions, the nature of merit has been problematized, leading to its redefinition to take account of organizational and societal constraints on women and individuals from diverse groups. In Part II, we broaden the discussion to include the minutiae of gender differences in communication strategies and how they are differentially valued.

Patricia Buzzanell and Rebecca Meisenbach begin the process in Chapter 2 by reviewing existing and potential research approaches to the employment interview. They view employment interview research through four different lenses, as explored by Ashcraft (2004) in her work on the interlinkages of gender, organization and discourse. Ashcraft’s four lenses, briefly put, are firstly, the outcome or effect lens, in which discourse is seen as an outcome of gender. Research from this viewpoint (which is also the viewpoint adopted by most existing research into the employment interview) focuses on how gender shapes individual linguistic choices, interactional strategies and style. The second lens, performance, presents the reciprocal viewpoint to the first, focusing on how individual talk shapes the performance of gendered identity. The two remaining frames move beyond perceptions by and of the individual to encompass organizational and social levels of discourse, which both enable and constrain gender in ways likely not to be perceived by participants in the employment interview, just as they remain largely hidden in other areas of organizational and social life. The four lenses taken together provide tools for uncovering different assumptions underlying existing and potential research into the employment interview and other similar workplace situations. The authors also discuss how the four lenses suggest ways of achieving more equitable outcomes for women and diverse individuals in employment interviews.

Kathryn O’Neill, Carol Hansen and Gary May pursue a similar agenda in Chapter 3 in their review of research into problems associated with the transfer of organizational training, especially training aimed at producing better interpersonal communication and leadership at work. They first consider how societal culture shapes gender schemas and prescribed social roles, and then how gender-related theories are linked to organizational culture. Organizational culture, in turn, is linked to the issue of training transfer in the workplace, since the cultural environment of the organization affects individuals’ capacity and motivation to transfer to the workplace the skills of communication and leadership they have learned in training situations. Problems often arise because the behaviours taught in typical interpersonal skills workshops are frequently seen as feminine and therefore tend to be resisted by learners. Often, the learned behaviours are extinguished by a masculine-oriented organizational culture before they can be put into effect in the workplace. The authors conclude that training interventions aimed at changing approaches to interpersonal communication need to be considered as interventions at the level of organizational culture, rather than as simple workplace training. Like other culture changes, and as emphasized in the organizational culture literature, such interventions will fail in the absence of strong modelling and support by senior management.

In Chapter 4, Jennifer Peck undertakes a more micro-level analysis of communication factors affecting formal promotion and other processes underlying women’s advancement at work. In her discussion of workplace promotion and linguistic interactions, she discusses the problems created by different sex-role expectations of men and women at work. According to traditional sex-role norms as they translate to the workplace, women are expected to be dependable, cooperative, intuitively perceptive and to exhibit the ‘soft’ skills of management. Men, on the other hand, are required to be intelligent, analytical, ‘dynamic’ and to excel at ‘hard’ skills in the management arena. However, following traditional female sex-role patterns frequently does not result in women reaching executive positions, since the skills required for executive positions seem to be associated with the managerial views of men that both genders hold. A double bind for women is created both by the fact that skills of organizational success are associated with men, and also because for women to exhibit skills regarded simply as ‘natural’ for them means that they are less likely to receive acknowledgement of these skills in formal evaluation or promotional processes. This is despite the fact that the ‘new’ management skills for the twenty-first century are often seen as ‘soft’ or ‘women’s’ skills.

Gender, Communication and Organizational Boundaries: Linkages and Violations

In Part II of the book, the emphasis shifts from communication within specific and crucial employment events to more routine instances of workplace communication and the gender issues associated with them. In addition, rather than focusing on people’s attempts to move vertically through the organizational hierarchy via the processes of entry, training and promotion, the chapters in this part focus on lateral relationships. These include general workplace groups, as well as lateral relationships external to the organization, such as advising customers or clients in a professional setting and managing organizational relationships in the international arena. Part II focuses on gender issues in how organizational boundaries are both maintained and crossed, including (as in the last chapter in the part) when the crossing of boundaries represents violation.

Linda Carli, in Chapter 5, provides a detailed summary of empirical academic research on gender differences in communication, particularly in work groups. She pays particular attention to research that either reinforces or questions stereotypical views of women as communal, collaborative communicators and of men as agentic, forceful communicators. She argues that most research does indeed reveal women to be warmer and more communal in their communication styles, but that various situational factors in workplaces have been found to moderate this. For example, both men and women communicate more warmly towards women, and features associated with typical ‘male’ and ‘female’ differences in communication styles are more marked in same-sex than in mixed-sex groups. In addition, factors related to people’s expectations of their own and other people’s behaviour, their relative power in the situation, and their perceptions about what type of behaviour will increase their influence in a situation all play a role in determining communication styles. While this is consistent with the general finding that men tend to communicate in a more mitigated and less dominant manner to men and to exhibit more dominance towards women, there are factors that can alter the situation for women. These include women being seen in a leadership role, or the topic of the communication being one on which the particular woman – or women in general – are perceived to know a good deal about. As Peck and other authors in the book point out, however, this still leaves a double bind for women. Appearing competent can actually reduce a woman’s influence because it makes her less likeable, since behaviour seen as competent often asserts status and uses fewer qualities of communality. Women need to combine competence with communality to overcome resistance to their influence, while still acting in accordance with traditional expectations of their role. The way through the double bind seems to be for women to exercise transformational leadership and to do this more than men do. Transformational leadership combines communal qualities and leadership effectiveness, in ways that allow women to excel as leaders and still maintain their traditional communal styles of communication. This is discussed in more depth in Chapters 13 and 14.

Joan Mulholland, in Chapter 6, expands on the reservations presented by Carli about when and whether gender determines communication style, and suggests how other factors in a workplace situation may reduce or even nullify its influence. Mulholland’s discussion of professional communications with clients highlights that while gender problems in communication have been thought to occur because of profound differences in men’s and women’s preferred ways of knowing and understanding and in their preferences for different social relations between the participants, different problems occur in communications between advisor and client simply because of the nature of ‘advice’ itself, as well as the nature of ‘advisorhood’ and ‘clienthood’. The nature of advice giving may make at least as much difference as gender to what participants consider an appropriate response in a particular situation. Clients signal, by the language they adopt, what role they feel themselves to be in. These roles can range from one of complete ignorance and helplessness, to one where clients believe themselves to have a great deal of knowledge, or one where they are generally knowledgeable but lack one element of required information, and so on. In addition, general trends towards the casualization of language signal affiliation in ways that are beginning to even out gender differences. In summary, rather than asking what gender the participants are in a advisor–client exchange, researchers of advisor–client communications are discerning a continuum of affiliative-instrumental communicative styles that, increasingly, transcend gender issues.

Beverly Metcalfe, in Chapter 7, continues and develops Mulholland’s more complex view of gender differences in language with her insights drawn from the realm of international business. Like many authors in the book, Metcalfe takes issue with both the ‘difference’ paradigm (‘men and women speak differently because of early socialization’) and the ‘dominance’ paradigm (‘gender-based language differences reveal the economic dominance that men still typically exercise over women’). Both, she argues, present an overly simple view of a phenomenon that is better understood as multi-layered and fluid. She uses three different approaches to elucidate this view. First, in a way similar to Mulholland, she takes Butler’s (1990, 1993) notions of gender as a performative social construct to examine how individuals employ a wide range of linguistic repertoires. Second, she draws on the idea of ‘communities of practice’ (CofP), or the ways individuals’ attachments to a wide range of different communities with different norms and practices allow them to adopt different identity positions within specific groups. Finally, she uses critical discourse analysis, which focuses on the ways language creates and sustains gendered power relations. All of them are used in her discussion of gender and communication issues as seen in the light of insights from international business. She draws on two rapidly changing environments: the Middle East and Eastern Europe, which present different communication approaches as ‘typically’ male or female, to argue along with Holmes et al. (2003) that masculinity and femininity are not opposites, but...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Gender and Organizational Theory Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• About the Editors
• PART I Gender and Communication Situations in the Employment Lifespan
• PART II Gender, Communication and Organizational Boundaries: Linkages and Violations
• PART III Gender and Communication Channels in Special Workplace Environments
• PART IV Communicating to Get Things Done
• PART V The Future: Gender and Computer–mediated Communication at Work
• Index