Rovira-Asenjo Núria, Pietraszkiewicz Agnieszka, Sczesny Sabine, Gumí Tània, Guimerà Roger, Sales-Pardo Marta
Department of Chemical Engineering, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain.
Department of Psychology, Division of Social Psychology and Social Neuroscience, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
PLoS One. 2017 Oct 23;12(10):e0186045. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0186045. eCollection 2017.
Leadership positions are still stereotyped as masculine, especially in male-dominated fields (e.g., engineering). So how do gender stereotypes affect the evaluation of leaders and team cohesiveness in the process of team development? In our study participants worked in 45 small teams (4-5 members). Each team was headed by either a female or male leader, so that 45 leaders (33% women) supervised 258 team members (39% women). Over a period of nine months, the teams developed specific engineering projects as part of their professional undergraduate training. We examined leaders' self-evaluation, their evaluation by team members, and team cohesiveness at two points of time (month three and month nine, the final month of the collaboration). While we did not find any gender differences in leaders' self-evaluation at the beginning, female leaders evaluated themselves more favorably than men at the end of the projects. Moreover, female leaders were evaluated more favorably than male leaders at the beginning of the project, but the evaluation by team members did not differ at the end of the projects. Finally, we found a tendency for female leaders to build more cohesive teams than male leaders.
领导职位仍然被刻板地认为是男性化的，尤其是在男性主导的领域（如工程领域）。那么，性别刻板印象在团队发展过程中是如何影响对领导者的评价和团队凝聚力的呢？在我们的研究中，参与者们在45个小团队（4 - 5名成员）中工作。每个团队由一名女性或男性领导带领，这样45名领导者（33%为女性）管理着258名团队成员（39%为女性）。在九个月的时间里，这些团队开展特定的工程项目，作为其本科专业培训的一部分。我们在两个时间点（第三个月和第九个月，即合作的最后一个月）考察了领导者的自我评价、团队成员对他们的评价以及团队凝聚力。虽然一开始我们没有发现领导者自我评价中的任何性别差异，但在项目结束时，女性领导者对自己的评价比男性更积极。此外，在项目开始时，团队成员对女性领导者的评价比对男性领导者更积极，但在项目结束时，团队成员的评价没有差异。最后，我们发现女性领导者比男性领导者有建立更具凝聚力团队的倾向。
