Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
  • Publication
    A playful path to more professional equity? Networking across diversity via sport
    Leaders develop via all domains of their lives. Yet, leaders’ sports involvement has been largely overlooked despite its theoretical and practical relevance, particularly for social development. Moreover, the limited research on the downstream social consequences of leaders’ sports involvement reveals different effects for men and women leaders—even opposing effects for the latter. Thus, we integrate social cognitive theory from developmental psychology to make sense of these contradictory findings. We theorize that sports contexts facilitate women’s networking with higher-status (male) leaders through its playfulness (i.e., leisurely, spontaneous, and socially interactive). An archival study of 644 leaders’ Twitter/X posts shows that sports generate more engagement—especially men interacting with women leaders’ sports posts (Study 1). A qualitative study with 58 leaders suggests sports’ playfulness facilitates these interactions as well as networking, results that we also quantitatively validated using ChatGPT (Study 2). Two recall experiments (Ntotal = 1,076) showed women leaders’ networking in sports (vs. traditional) contexts was more playful, and more playful sports contexts facilitated women (vs. men) leaders’ networking across gender and status differences (Pilot Study, Study 3). Our results show that more playful sports contexts facilitate women leaders’ successful networking across gender and status diversity—an innovation helping to level the playing field of gendered social capital development and future leadership inequalities in organizations. These results advance our understanding of conventional ways of networking as not always strategic and planned while also adding to diversity research by showing that sports—often framed as exclusionary—can also be inclusive.
  • Publication
    How to foster more sustinable inclusion (when leaders aren't inclusive)
    ( 2024-05-03) ; ;
    Sanne Feenstra
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    David Cheng
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    Niels Van Quaquebeke
    Research and practice have focused on if and how leaders can be more inclusive towards their followers and teams. However, in practice, we know that--despite trainings, executive education, etc.--some leaders still cannot (or will not) include. Here, we review the individual and contextual level reasons for this while also highlighting a potential path forward. By theoretically exploring the dynamic, helical process through which followers can also upwardly influence their leaders and their leaders' inclusion, we formulate a way through which followers can inspire more sustainable inclusion over time.
  • Publication
    Diversity in Elite Leadership: Global Effects, New Outcome Variables, and Deep Dives Into Processes
    ( 2023)
    Alison M. Konrad
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    Diana Bilimoria
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    Cynthia E. Clark
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    Ryan Miller
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    Martha L. Maznevski
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    Karlygash Assylkhan
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    Colin Birkhead
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  • Publication
    Friend vs. fiend? A review of follower humor
    ( 2023) ; ;
    Petra Schmid
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    Niels Van Quaquebeke
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    Humor is prolific across our professional lives. Most humor research in organizations has focused on leaders’ humor, showing that more humorous leaders are better leaders. But a key feature of professional contexts—hierarchy—deeply shapes the nature and effects of humor, particularly for understudied groups: followers and those who are relatively lower in the hierarchy. In this interdisciplinary review of upward humor, we consolidate key themes across theories and literatures to propose an overarching model of behavioral humor while also parsimoniously organizing key outcomes along agency and communality. So, as alluded in our title, upwardly humorous employees can be viewed as friend—or fiend—generating more variable reactions than leaders due to their relatively lower position in the hierarchy.
  • Publication
    Advancing Gender Equity and Diversity in the Workplace: The Role of Allyship and Leadership
    ( 2023)
    Lyubykh, Zhanna
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    Mercer, Danielle
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    Megan Marie Walsh
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    Agnihotri, Nikita
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    Jasmien Khattab
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    Yang Yongkang
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    Li Jia
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    Anne Nederveen Pieterse
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    Natalya Alonso
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    Nick Turner
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    Cara-lynn Scheuer
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    Megan Marie Walsh
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    Catherine Loughlin
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    Shasanka Chalise
    Addressing inequity is a pressing societal concern. For example, numerous studies have provided consistent evidence for gender inequities as well as barriers and adverse workplace experiences women face. In this symposium, we aim to shed light on factors that can help accelerate social progress in the domain of gender and leadership. The papers in this symposium showcase how leaders can effectively facilitate women’s leadership advancement (Bajet Mestre & Gloor; Lyubykh, Alonso, & Turner) and help manage team diversity (Yang, Li, van Knippenberg, & Pieterse), offer a psychometrically robust scale to measure leader allyship (Mercer et al.), and explore how female leaders navigate tensions between gender expectations and leadership expectations (Khattab & Hentschel). We will conclude with a discussion (Hideg) to suggest directions for future research a well as takeaways for leaders, organizations, and policymakers.
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  • Publication
    Flirting, jokes, and compliments: How female leaders shape a key source of entrepreneurial well-being
    ( 2023) ; ;
    Amanda Shantz
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    Philipp Sieger
    Entrepreneurship is an intensely stressful journey that can undermine entrepreneurial well-being. While most research on entrepreneurial well-being has focused on individual characteristics as key antecedents, we examine the role of an overlooked but highly prevalent intra-team social experience on entrepreneur well-being: Social Sexual Behavior (SSB). To do so, we draw on interaction ritual theory to explain the mixed evidence of how these non-work-related behaviors with a sexual component (e.g., flirting, joking, and complimenting on physical appearances) affect worker well-being. That is, when SSB is frequent and part of the interaction ritual (i.e., accepted forms of behavior incorporated into scripted routine interactions that facilitates organizing social relations), SSB is positively associated with well-being. In contrast, if SSB is rare and not accepted as an interaction ritual, SSB is negatively associated with well-being, because SSB is flagged as a negative behavior that deviates from accepted forms of behavior and hinders social relations. By facilitating or hindering social relations, the frequency of experienced SSB at work predicts receiver well-being according to a U-shaped function. But given leaders’ critical influence on team norms and rituals, we examine how leaders shape SSB’s effects on entrepreneurial well-being and if this differs by leader gender. As female (vs. male) leaders may be more responsive to gendered interaction dynamics like SSB, we propose a moderating effect of female leadership on the previously hypothesized U-shaped effect of SSB on receiver well-being, such that the U-shape is more pronounced with greater shares of female leaders. Finally, because men may feel more negative emotions in post-#MeToo era mixed-gender interactions—perhaps especially male employees with female leaders—anxiety may be amplified (or mitigated) when female leaders problematize (or accommodate) SSB, such that the moderating effect of the share of female leaders on receiver well-being is stronger for male (vs. female) receivers. Analyses of an international sample of entrepreneurs from the 2018 GUESSS dataset (n=11,177) generally support our theorizing. A pair of experiments are also planned to causally replicate and extend these results. This research contributes to the entrepreneurship, leadership, and diversity literatures by clarifying the mixed effects of SSB on well-being in the literature with more precise, non-linear theorizing tested in the masculine context of entrepreneurship. This research also fits well with the conference theme by examining how leaders shape follower well-being, represented by co-owners and founders (respectively).
  • Publication
    Building Diverse and Inclusive Social Networks: New Theories and Empirical Evidence
    ( 2023) ; ;
    Raina Brands
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    Ko Kuwabara
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    Paul Ingram
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    Tatiana Lluent
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    Gianluca Carnabuci
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    Eugenia Bajet Mestre
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    Isabelle Engeler
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    Meredith Woehler
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    Julia Stevenson-street
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    Courtney Hart
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