Women remain underrepresented in leadership roles, partly because leader-like behaviors conflict with traditional gender role expectations. This incongruity can enhance social backlash, making it harder for women to internalize the identity of leader. As being seen, and seeing oneself, as a leader is central to pursuing and maintaining leadership roles, it is important to understand how the leader identity development process unfolds differently for men and women. We propose that women face greater social costs for engaging in authority-claiming and differentiate two forms of claiming in terms of potential backlash for women: legitimating (leveraging formal role, policies) and collaborative (offering expertise, resources) claiming. In a daily diary study of 77 leaders (579 daily surveys), women were significantly less likely than men to engage in legitimating claiming, though no gender difference emerged for collaborative claiming. As legitimating claiming more effectively elicited follower granting of authority and daily changes in leader identity strength, men may gain a cumulative identity advantage through greater engagement in both agentic and collaborative behaviors. By distinguishing between types of leader claiming, this study highlights a social exchange mechanism contributing to gender disparities in leader identity development and offers insight into the dynamic nature of leader identity.
Broucher et al. (Sun,) studied this question.
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