Same Talk, Different Reaction? Emergent Leadership, Task-Oriented Behavior, and the Role of Gender

Scholars have contributed much to identifying general factors that may hinder women from emerging as leaders. However, we still lack knowledge about the concrete behaviors that occur between assessing the independent variable (gender) and measuring the outcome (emergent leadership). That is, whereas many studies have linked post-hoc perceptions of behaviors to emergent leadership, it remains unclear whether the effect of gender on emergent leadership is due to objective behavioral differences. We develop a framework that differentiates between agentic and communal task-oriented verbal behaviors as predictors of emergent leadership. We then draw from backlash theory to argue that objective agentic task-oriented behaviors are positively associated with emergent leadership, particularly when men exhibit these behaviors. Communal task-oriented behaviors are positively associated with emergent leadership, particularly when women exhibit these behaviors. We used interaction coding to assess the verbal behaviors of 116 members of 41 self-managed teams. Men and women exhibited the same amount of task-oriented agentic and communal behaviors and were equally likely to emerge as leaders. However, men experienced an emergent leadership advantage when engaging in agentic and communal task-oriented behaviors. We discuss the implications for developing accurate theories that differentiate between men and women’s actual versus perceived behaviors.