دانلود رایگان مقاله دست کم گرفتن تاثیر رهبری: آیا رهبران زن حساس تر هستند؟

INTRODUCTION

Over the past 20 years, women have made significant inroads into the world of leadership and management in the U.S. In fact, it is estimated that nearly 50% of supervisory and management positions are currently held by women. Yet, when we look at the inroads into the very top positions (i.e., C-suite), these proportions fall off dramatically (under 5%). Many reasons have been proposed forthissignificant drop off, including self-selection and discrimination. Recently, however, research has examined more subtle reasons for such a drop. For example, the notion of ‘‘think leader, think male’’ is still alive and well. Thisstereotype is prevalent among both men and women. While there is no research to support the notion that men make betterleadersthanwomen,itis possible that this stereotype is influencing women’s opinions of themselves as leaders. This led us to speculate about women leaders’self-awareness. Are women aware of their leadership capabilities and their potentialto serve in senior positions?Isit possible that women are less aware oftheirleadership abilities than their male counterparts?Isit possible thatthey are failing to appreciate their own talents and impact?

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

We now offer suggestions on what can be done to improve leaderself-awareness in general, what women leaders can do to minimize their tendency toward under-prediction, and what organizations can do to aid women leaders. In general, we need to do a better job of teaching and assessing both components of self-awareness in leadership and management education and development. In our management and leadership development classrooms, which aim to increase manager and leader capability, the curriculum and textbooks overwhelmingly ignore the other-focused component of leader self-awareness. Instead, they focus primarily on the self-focused component of self-awareness with several deferring to Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence as the source for defining self-awareness. In contrast, in a review of business education in their book Rethinking the MBA, Srikant Datar, David Garvin, and Patrick Cullen of Harvard Business School found that ‘‘Virtually all of the top business schools aspire to ‘develop leaders,’ yet their efforts in this area are widely viewed as falling short . . . Executives [have] cited a number of concrete steps that MBA programs could take to further their students’ development as leaders. Perhaps the most important was the need to foster heightened, and more accurate, self-awareness.’’ As a result, if we are to help all leaders, we must begin to focus on both components of self-awareness in education as well as in training and development.