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To investigate whether individuals more closely associate characteristics of effective leaders with men compared to women and whether those associations advantage men in interactions.

An online survey and a laboratory experiment. The online survey had participants evaluate characteristics they most closely associated with effective leaders, men in general, or women in general. The laboratory experiment assigned participants fictitious partners before they completed an ambiguous task. Partners were men or women, and instructions did or did not describe contrast sensitivity ability as related to leadership ability.

In Study 1, participants evaluated characteristics of men in general more closely to the characteristics of effective leaders than they did the characteristics of women in general. Findings showed this effect to be driven by responses from male participants. In Study 2, the influence gap between male and female partners widened significantly in a direction that advantaged men when study instructions described contrast sensitivity as being positively correlated with leadership ability.

Individuals associate characteristics of effective leadership in ways that advantage men and that those associations advantage men in interactions.

Results indicate that even if differences in competency expectations between women and men were to disappear, women might remain disadvantaged in interactions with implications for leadership.

The paper conclusively demonstrates that participants in the samples associated men more than women with leadership ability/effectiveness and that the associations advantaged men in interactions. These results have broad implications for research in status, gender, and leadership.

The personalities of leaders have been shown to impact the culture of their organizations and are also expected to have a more distal impact on the firm’s financial performance. However, the authors also expect that leader gender is an important intervening variable such that exhibiting various personality dimensions may result in unique cultural and performance-based outcomes for women and men leaders. Thus, the authors seek to examine first the impact of leader personality on organizational performance, as driven through organizational culture as a mediating mechanism. In doing so, the authors propose the expected impact of specific personality dimensions on certain types of organizational cultures, and those cultures’ subsequent impact on the organization’s performance. The authors then extend to consider the moderating effects of leader gender on the relationship between leader personality and organization. To support their propositions, the authors draw from upper echelons and implicit leadership theories. The authors encourage researchers to consider the proposition within a sample of the largest publicly traded US companies (i.e., Fortune 500) at an important era in history such that for the first time, 10% of these companies are led by women. In doing so, the authors hope to understand the leadership dynamics at the highest echelons of corporate governance and provide actionable insights for companies aiming to optimize their leadership composition and drive sustainable performance.

The study aims to attain insights into the impact of destructive leadership and citizenship pressures in inducing employee silence through the lens of social exchange and the conservation of resources theory. The research further relies on Friedkin’s attitude-behaviour linkage framework (2010), while taking into account the role of employees’ defensive cognitive evaluations, as against the previously accented emotion-focused explanations.

In order to corroborate the pertinence and contextual relevance of the framework, a survey-based study was conducted with a purposively selected sample of 133 full-time employees from the systemically important banks. The sample size was determined through an a-priori power analysis using G*Power, and the hypothesized serial mediation model was tested using PLS-SEM in SmartPLS v_4.0.

The findings accentuate the significance of destructive leadership in navigating employees’ silence directly and serially through continuance commitment and compulsory citizenship behaviours. The study also underlines that rather than being portrayed as unidimensional outcomes centered on attitudes, employee behaviours ought to be considered contingent retorts under attitude-behaviour cascades.

The study contributes to strategic human resource management literature by offering a cognition-based explanation for employees’ silence, taking Pakistan’s cultural and contextual orientation into cognizance. Extending on the attitude-behaviour linkage framework, the study provides that attitudes shaped by defensive cognitive evaluations may concurrently foster involuntary (citizenship) as well as voluntary (silence) behaviours.