RSS FeedUpcoming EventsTo Delegate or Not To Delegate: Gender Differences in Affective Associations and Behavioral Responses to Delegation, April 10/live/events/243624-to-delegate-or-not-to-delegate-gender-differences

Effectively delegating work to others is considered critical to managerial success, as it frees up managers’ time and develops subordinates’ skills. We propose that female leaders are less likely than male leaders to capitalize on these benefits of delegating. Although delegation has communal (e.g., relational) and agentic (e.g., assertive) properties, we argue that female leaders, as compared to male leaders, find it more difficult to delegate tasks due to gender-role incongruence. In five studies, we draw upon social role and backlash theories to show that women imbue delegation with more agentic traits, have more negative associations with delegating, and feel greater guilt about delegating than men. These associations result in women delegating less than men and, when they do delegate, having lower-quality interactions with subordinates. We further show that reframing delegation as communal attenuates women’s negative associations with delegation. These findings reveal that even when a given behavior has both agentic and communal elements, perceptions of agency can undermine women’s engagement in them. However, emphasizing the communal nature of seemingly agentic acts may encourage women’s engagement in such critical leadership behaviors. These findings have theoretical and practical implications for research on gender differences and leadership behavior in the workplace.

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Developing causally valid motive measures: The case of need for sex, April 24/live/events/243954-developing-causally-valid-motive-measures-the-case

Motive research in the McClelland-Atkinson tradition is based on a concept of validity that emphasizes a measure’s sensitivity to experimental manipulation. In this talk, I will briefly portray this view of validity and connect it to modern views of validity that place a premium on understanding the causal process that generates measurement scores. I will also discuss why sensitivity to manipulation is not enough to establish validity and introduce the EMMIC validation approach, consisting of experimental manipulation, measure, indicator, and criterion. I will illustrate the usefulness of this approach with the development of a new thematic-apperceptive measure of the need for sex (n Sex). I will present data from six experimental studies, with 826 participants, in which sexual motivation was aroused through a variety of methods (picture priming, videos, audio stories) and effects of arousal on picture-story content changes (measure), subjective and objective measures of affect (indicator) and key-pressing for access to sexual stimuli (criterion) were assessed. I will also briefly present findings regarding associations between the new n Sex measure and self-reported sexual intercourse frequency, questionnaire measures of sexual motivation, participant gender, and organizational and state measures of gonadal steroid hormones.

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