Gender and Leadership Aspiration: The impact of the organizational environment Defended on Thursday, 25 February 2016

Although some important work regarding gender-specific aspiration has been done already, conditions fostering leadership aspiration – particularly among women – are not completely understood. Therefore, this dissertation focuses on assessing the potential impact of the organizational environment, including formal and informal elements, as well as relevant actors and their respective impact on leadership aspiration. I show that supervisor gender is important as women reporting to a female supervisor report higher levels of support and control and as a result display higher leadership aspiration. In addition to looking at the supervisor, I also focused on work life initiatives, showing that their availability also increases women’s leadership aspiration. Apart from looking at the supervisor and formal initiatives, I examined informal elements, namely cooperative climate and its impact on leadership aspiration. I predicted and showed that men and women are more responsive to different elements within a cooperative climate, mapping to their gender-specific disposal to different self-construals. As women are more disposed to a relational self-construal I predicted and showed that their leadership aspiration is more responsive to a cooperative interpersonal climate. Eventually, I assessed whether the interplay between the organization and the individual plays an important role in influencing aspiration. Therefore I zoomed in on identification and showed that high organizational identification is linked to female leadership aspiration. In sum, my findings highlight important precursors of women’s leadership aspiration within the organizational environment and point to interesting avenues for future research and relevant implications for practitioners alike striving towards increasing female leadership aspiration.

Keywords

gender, leadership, leadership aspiration, support, job control, work life initiatives, cooperative climate, communal orientation, organizational identification