Women in Leadership

Karin Klenke, Karin Klenke

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787432772
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Women leaders in many parts of the world have leadership opportunities that never existed before as a result of technology, globalization, and demographic shifts that have produced more female graduates than in the past and created a workforce which consists almost 50% of women. Ever more so, in today's rapidly changing environment, the contexts in which women exercise leadership is critically important in shaping their leadership style. At the same time, objectifying women in contexts such as sports and the media or the patriarchal ideology that permeates contexts such as the military and the church have changed very little. This book, updated and expanded from the 2011 first edition, acknowledges and discusses the belief that the context in which women exercise leadership is critically important in shaping their leadership style.
Each chapter opens with a vignette of an extraordinary leader in the respective context, presents a contextual analysis, and discusses issues, controversies and paradoxes germane to the context of interest. What is the future of women's leadership in a global environment characterized by ambiguity, uncertainty, increasing interdependence and interconnectivity? Award-winning author Karin Klenke shows us in this revised edition of Women in Leadership.

1

Women’s Leadership in Context

Mary Barra’s appointment as CEO of General Motors (GM) became effective in January 2014, the first woman to ascend to the top job at a major auto company. Prior to her current position, Barra served as Vice President of Global Product Development and Vice President of Global Human Resources and several engineering and staff positions. In these roles, she was responsible for the design, engineering, program management, and quality of GM vehicles around the world. But Barra’s tenure at GM goes back several decades before she was promoted to management and leadership positions. She started at GM as a co-op student at the Pontiac Motor division where her father served as a die maker for 39 years.

Her appointment as CEO came shortly before GM became embroiled in a scandal over faulty ignition switches which were linked to 13 deaths in crashes in which the air bags failed to deflate (Horovitz, 2014). Despite warnings, GM ignored them and installed the faulty ignition switch. Healy and Meier (2014) called the fatal ignition switch mistake as one of several foul-ups and stunning irresponsibility. The defect eventually played a part in 54 crashes and 13 deaths linked to the recall of 2.6 million cars worldwide. She earned a reputation of “tough guy” when she fired 15 employees over the ignition switch debacle. The crisis was an early test of Barra’s leadership and has raised questions about whether the 34-year company veteran can really change the culture as vast as GM, a company that has run through five CEOs in the last six years (Muller, 2014, p. 68). Barra reached an agreement with federal regulators to pay a record $35 million fine. She led GM through the crisis and a related series of embarrassing safety recalls. Her approach to leadership is one of consensus seeking, collaboration, and team building. Loftus (2014) claimed that the way Barra steered GM deftly through the ignition switch scandal was reminiscent of another great Detroit leader, Lee Iacocca who took the helm when Chrysler was in trouble.

Barra holds a Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the GM Institute (now Kettering University) and a Master’s in Business Administration from Stanford University. She is the mother of two teenage children and married to an independent consultant, Tony Barra, whom she met as an undergraduate student at Kettering University. Her favorite cars are the Chevrolet Camaro and the Pontiac Firebird (Vlasic, 2013).

Barra serves on the GM Board of Directors (BoD) which includes several female directors. The company has been acknowledged for having a high percentage of women board members. In 2016, she took on the added role of chairwomen of the board, combining the roles of CEO and chairperson of the BoD. In 2014, Forbes magazine named Barra as one of the “World’s Most Powerful Women” and Fortune magazine placed her on the list of its “50 Most Powerful Women in Business.” In 2016, she was again Number 1 on the Fortune list. In 2015, she appeared again on the list of Forbes magazine as Number 7 of 100 of the most powerful women. Under her leadership, GM is striving to become the global industry leader in automotive design and technology, product quality and safety, customer care and business results. Her appointment came shortly before GM became embroiled in a scandal over faulty small car ignition switches. Among the challenges Barra is facing are fixing GM’s troubled European operations, spurring more growth in China and Asia, and improving relationships with suppliers. And while GM has been profitable for 15 consecutive quarters, it still lags competitors like Toyota and Ford Motor in overall earning (Vlasic, 2013). Barra has pledged to make GM the most valued auto company rather than just achieving the highest sales volumes. In 2016, she joined Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum to meet regularly with the President and other members of the team to discuss policy and its impact on economic growth, job creation, and productivity.

Her role as CEO and chairwomen of the BoD illustrates some of the concepts discussed in this chapter, including the role and importance of context, the intersection of gender and leadership shattering the glass ceiling, and role incongruity which are discussed in the following sections.

Introduction

Leadership is one of the most studied issues of our times. There are close to 3000 books on the topic listed on Amazon, as well as a variety of academic, practitioner, and popular journals, conferences, education programs offering undergraduate, masters, and doctoral degrees in leadership. However, as Fairhurst’s work (2007) attests, the study of leadership remains fraught with tension, ambiguity, uncertainty, and paradox: so much scholarly fire and fury, so little illumination. On the one hand, our general fascination with leadership — and a concomitant belief that leaders are the key to solving our problems — remains intense. On the other hand, this fascination is combined with a diminishing confidence that leaders in politics, business, and the church can deliver anything worthwhile at all (Tourish, 2008). Meindl (1985) argued that despite the sheer volume of theory and research devoted to the study of leadership, we have been unable to generate an understanding of leadership that is both intellectually compelling and emotionally satisfying. As a result, the concept of leadership remains largely elusive and enigmatic.

The study of leadership, as we know it today, is based on the paradigms we have formulated, the theories we have developed, the methodologies we have established, and the benchmarks for the practice of leadership we have put into use are in a state of transition. Many of them were developed when organizations were substantially different compared to contemporary firms. Much of what we currently know about leadership was learned in the context of hierarchical bureaucratic structures. Embedded in this form of organization is both an ideology that supports sharp gradations of power and authority and a centralized flow of information and top-down directions from the CEO as the omnipotent leader residing at the apex of the organization. The prevalent leadership style has been command and control with power and authority resting with the CEO and channeled down the organizational hierarchy.

Is the study of leadership at the cusp of a paradigm shift? We have seen incremental shifts for decades. For example, transactional/transformational leadership (Bass, 1985; Burns, 1978, 2003) has been the poster child of leadership theory for over 30 years. Nevertheless, the theory still represents a two-dimensional model of leadership like earlier theories such as democratic and autocratic, task- and people-oriented, or initiating structure and consideration leadership styles. A paradigm shift, also called a scientific revolution (Kuhn, 1962), requires a radical break from existing models of leadership. Paradigm shifts happen when enough anomalies have accrued that the dominant paradigm can no longer accommodate. For example, in the case of transactional and transformational leadership, the theory cannot account for leadership phenomena that we are observing in team-based organizations where the single, omnipotent leader who resides at the apex of the organization has been replaced by a top management team populated by senior executives in the C-suite, a group of “chief officers” such as the chief executive officer (CEO), chief operation officer (COO), chief financial officer (CFO), chief diversity officer (CDO), or chief information officer (CIO). The number of chief officers has greatly multiplied recently to include new position titles such as chief learning officer (CLO), chief ethics officer, and chief knowledge officer (CKO) signifying a shift in leadership from the individual to team or dispersed leadership. However, at this very top level of the organizational hierarchy, the number of women occupying positions in the C-suite remains very small.

Traditional theories of leadership such as trait (Mann, 1959; Stogdill, 1948, 1974), behavior (Halpin & Winer, 1957; Lickert, 1967), and contingency (Fiedler, 1967; House, 1971; Kerr & Jermier, 1978) have given way to “new” theories (Bryman, 2004) including transactional/transformational (Bass, 1985; Burns, 1978, 2003) and visionary leadership (Sashkin & Sashkin, 2003). Although traditional theories have focused on physical, personality, or cognitive traits, behavioral styles, and specific situations, the new theories have shifted the emphasis from the focus on leaders as omnipotent heroes and saviors whose performance accounts for organizational successes and failures to leadership processes which include followers a vital part of the leader–follower equation. Virtually all of the traditional theories are leader-centric. In contrast, the new theories take followers into account and some of them offer follower-centered perspectives (Chaleff, 2009; Kellerman, 2008; Meindl, 1985). As an alternative to the leader-centric theories, these authors proposed a follower-centric approach that views both leadership and its consequences as largely constructed by followers and hence influenced by followers’ cognitive processes and inter-follower influence processes (Meindl & Shamir, 2006). The newer leadership theories also increasingly take into account the role of time and place in leadership, as leaders and followers can be geographically dispersed cutting through time zones and localities around the globe.

In addition to traditional and new leadership theories, we are now evidencing the emergence of a wide array of alternative models characterized by a focus on core concepts such as spirituality (Fry, 2003), authenticity (Avolio, Gardner, Walumba, Luthans, & May, 2004; Gardner & Avolio, 2005; Harter, 2001; Klenke, 2005a, 2007a), chaos and complexity (Marion & Uhl-Bien, 2001; Schneider & Somers, 2006; Uhl-Bien, Marion, & McKelvey, 2007), relationality (Ospina & Uhl-Bien, 2012; Uhl-Bien, 2006), ethics (Brown & Treviño, 2006; Ciulla, 2004), and transcendence (Carey, 1992; Crossan, Veran, & Nanjad, 2008). These emergent theories attempt to accommodate new organizational structures characterized by more fluid, temporal arrangements, rapidly changing technologies, increased globalization, and changing workplace demography. If we were to use one word to characterize the contemporary study of leadership, that word is diversity: diversity of definitions, theories, and paradigms; diversity of gender and ethnicity; and diversity of contexts. Furthermore, this body of literature continues to offer a contradictory and at times confusing picture that illustrates the dissonance between theory and practice. For example, on the one hand, the media (Chapter 6) and popular literature emphasize women’s success in leadership, and yet, on the other hand, they highlight their inability to succeed, especially in high-profile positions (Lamsa & Sintonen, 2001). This is a no-win situation: Women succeed in areas where culture and context allow, but they do not promote themselves as much as men do (Babcock & Lashever, 2003; Eagly & Carli, 2007a, 2007b); yet that very success undermines their chances for advancement.

Women in Leadership

In 1996, I published a book entitled Women and Leadership: A Contextual Perspective (Klenke, 1996) which chronicles how and why women rose to leadership and traced some of the obstacles women encounter in their quest for leadership and why they were underrepresented in leadership roles in many profit and nonprofit organizations. If women did occupy leadership positions, they were often evaluated less favorably than their male counterparts with similar backgrounds and experience and earned considerably less than their male colleagues. This is not only the prevailing pattern in the United States, but current research from abroad (Equal Opportunity Commission, 2007) indicates that based on a major study by the Equal Opportunity Commission in the United Kingdom, women in the United Kingdom are also significantly underrepresented in senior leadership roles across public and private sector industries and professions. The overriding premise of the second edition of the book, like its predecessor, is that leadership is to a considerable extent shaped by context. Contextual factors set the boundaries in which leaders and followers interact and determine the demands and constraints that are placed on leaders.

The term “glass ceiling” was dubbed by Hymowitz and Schelhardt (1986), two Wall Street reporters, to denote an invisible barrier to the upward movement and advancement of women and minorities in management. It is a barrier that appears invisible but is strong enough to hold women back from top-level jobs merely because they are women rather than because they lack job-relevant skills, education, or experience (Morrison & Von Glinow, 1990; Morrison, White, Van Velsor, & the Center for Creative Leadership, 1992; Powell & Butterfield, 1994). Thus, even those women who rose steadily through the ranks eventually crashed into an impenetrable barrier while men are more likely to be accelerated into management positions by means of the “glass escalator” (Williams, 1992). According to Williams (1995), barriers preventing women from progressing into top leadership roles are even found in female-dominated occupations, where men ride a glass escalator to top positions.

For women, the executive suite seemed within their grasp, but they just could not break through the glass ceiling. The glass ceiling became a popular metaphor to explain why so few women moved up the organizational hierarchy and why they tended to be faced with more stringent requirements for promotion. Recent evidence suggests that women are breaking through the glass ceiling in many organizations (Dreher, 2003), which is not to say that the glass ceiling no longer exists. For example, Goodman, Fields, and Blum (2003) found that women were more likely to crack the glass ceiling in organizations that have lower management positions filled by women, higher management turnover, lower average management salary levels, place greater emphasis on development and promotion of employees, and operate in nonmanufacturing industries. This study, along with others, showed that institutionalized structural characteristics and organizational practices represent impediments that still make it difficult for women to break through the glass ceiling.

When women do break through the glass ceiling and reach senior executive positions, they are often faced with yet another barrier dubbed the “glass wall.” The glass wall became a metaphor for a double-pane barrier symbolic of the invisible barrier that surrounds the inner sanctum of powerful senior male executives. The glass wall implies that although some companies are promoting women to senior management levels, many women who shatter the glass ceiling are faced with yet another hurdle which often poses a bigger challenge and prevents them from rising to upper echelon leadership positions.

Ryan and Haslam (2005, 2007) extended the glass ceiling and the glass wall concepts to yet another metaphor which suggests that women are likely to find themselves on a “glass cliff” — an allusion to the fact that women’s leadership positions in some organizations are relatively risky or precarious because they are promoted in companies or divisions that are in a crisis. Such positions, according to the authors, “are potentially dangerous for women who hold them, as companies that experience consistently bad performances are likely to attract attention, both to their financial circumstances and to those on their board of directors” (Haslam & Ryan, 2008, p. 531; Ryan, Haslam, Hersby, & Bongiorno, 2011). In short, the concept of the glass cliff captures how women’s roles in top leadership are associated with a higher risk of failure. In a qualitative study, Ryan, Haslam, and Postmes (2007) studied the reaction of women and men to the glass cliff. The findings of this study showed that while women were most likely to explain the glass cliff in terms of pernicious processes such as a lack of alternative opportunities, sexism, or men’s in-group favoritism, men were most likely to favor largely benign interpretations, such as women’s suitability for difficult leadership tasks, the need for strategic decision making, or company factors unrelated to gender. Marissa Mayer in the opening vignette illustrates the dynamics of the glass cliff, showing that firms like yahoo are more likely to appoint women in leadership roles when the firms are not doing well.

Klenke (1996, 1997) introduced the metaphor of the labyrinth to capture women’s journeys as leaders as an alternative to the glass ceiling and related concepts. In Greek mythology, the labyrinth located on the island of Crete housed the Minotaur, a monster with a bull’s body and a human head feasting on young Athenian girls and boys who were offered to break the curse hanging over the city of Athens. In order to break this spell, the gods sent Theseus, son of Poseidon, to kill the Minotaur. Ariadne, daughter of the king of Crete, fell in love with Theseus and furnished him with a ball of thread which guided him out of the labyrinth after he slayed the Minotaur. I used the labyrinth metaphor to underscore the image of women leaders who make some initial inroads in the labyrinth of leadership but then may not find their way out (i.e., advancing to higher levels) without a thread of Ariadne. This thread may consist of a new leadership paradigm, new organizational structures or different contexts that are more congenial to women’s progress as leaders or revitalized industries that offer greater gender equality.

Eagly and Carli (2007a, 2007b) agree that the labyrinth is a better metaphor than the glass ceiling for what confronts women in their leadership pursuits. The authors note that it is:

an image with a long and varied history in ancient Greece, India, Nepal, native North and South America, medieval Europe and elsewhere. As a contemporary symbol, it conveys the idea of a complex journey toward a goal worth striving for. Passage through a labyrinth is not simple or direct, but requires persistence, awareness of one’s progress, and a careful analysis of the puzzles that lie ahead. For women who aspire to top leadership, routes exist but there are full of twists and turns, both expected and unexpected. Because all labyrinths have a viable route to the center, it is understood that the goals are attainable. The metaphor acknowledges obstacles but it is not ultimately discouraging. (p. x)

The leadership labyrinth (Klenke, 1996, 1997a, 1997b) has implications for further studies of how women leaders might successfully navigate the labyrinth-like path to the top of organizations and how organizations can best champion and support them in their journey.

Despite the many roadblocks that appear to exist, a number of women have reached top management positions and are occupying elite executive leadership roles, permitting researchers to examine factors associated with their success. Furst and Reeves (2008) argued that women’s emergence as leaders is due to the interaction of perceived personality characteristics, leadership styles, and accumulated experiences with the demands of a turbulent business environment. The authors note that “this type of environment demands leaders who communicate openly, encourage collaborative decision-making, take risks, share burdens with subordinates, and demonstrate integrity” (p. 381). In contemporary organizations which are flatter and less hierarchical compared to traditional bureaucratic organizations, women leaders are often consensus builders, conciliators, and collaborators; they are transformational leaders who are motivational and flexible in their leadership style who transcend their self-interests for the good of the group or organization.

Contextualizing Leadership

Klenke (1996) argued that context influences what leaders must do and what they can do. However, until recently, what has been lost in discussions of leadership is context (Kellerman, 2015). A leader’s mission and purpose — her reason for serving as a leader in her family, organization, church, community, sports club, or nation — is partly dictated by the demands and constraints of context. At all levels, individual, group, organizational, and societal, leadership is tied to context. It is context that shapes the process of leadership. Therefore, examining women in leadership from this perspective means analyzing different contexts such as business, politics, technology, sports, the media, and the global village. According to Klenke (1996):

contextual factors set the boundaries within which leaders and followers interact and determine the constraints and demands that surround the leader-follower dyad. Therefore requirements and demands for leadership differ depending on contextual dynamics and boundaries. For example, exercising leadership in the context of political systems in which leaders are appointed or elected is different from practicing leadership in social movements such as the women’s and civil rights movements, where leaders emerge as a function of a crisis. Evaluating a leading artist calls for a different set of criteria compared to evaluating the contributions of a leading scientist. Religion, science, the arts, and informal and formal organizations are com...