Gender differences in evaluation of performance and leadership ability: Autocratic vs. democratic managers

This laboratory experiment involved 290 undergraduate seniors (130 females and 160 males) who were taking the capstone course in business policy in the college of business at a large university. The population of business seniors from which the random sample was drawn consisted of approximately 3.7% African Americans, 7% Asians, 1% Hispanics, and 88.3% white Americans. The study investigated the impact of autocratic and democratic leadership styles on the perception of how well male and female managers perform as well as the leadership ability attributions made to them. It was found that, in general, democratic managers are perceived to be much higher performers, and superior leaders when compared to autocratic managers. There was some support for the gender contrast effect in that the autocratic female managers were perceived to be higher performers than autocratic male managers. Further, the study found support for the perceptual similarity thesis. Male subjects tended to evaluate other male managers higher while female subjects were partial to female managers in their evaluations. In particular, female subjects gave autocratic male managers very low evaluations on performance and judged them to be inferior leaders. The female subjects, however, gave female autocratic managers substantially higher evaluations in terms of both performance and leadership ability.