Female Supervisor at a Higher Level and Challenge a Modern Belief That Females Responded Negatively to Women in Higher Status

This research report written by Andrea C. Vival, Victoria L. Brescoll, Jamie L. Napier, John F. Docidio and Tom R. Tyler focuses on in-group favoritism in society and organizations. It discloses that females versus males rated female supervisor at a higher level and challenge a modern belief that females responded negatively to women in higher status.

Women have been considered not supporting each other for more than a century. This belief still exists today. To the contrary, the hypothesis in the report is that the gender of employees and supervisors will interact, which is consistent with gender in-group favoritism. The authors conducted two main studies to provide related evidence for this phenomenon.

One of the variables in the hypothesis is gender in-group favoritism. In-group favoritism, also known as intergroup bias, is a pattern of favoring members of one’s in-group over out-group members1. For Example, women (compared with men) will highly support a female supervisor than a male. The researchers (Andrea et al.) measured intergroup bias using a perception evaluation survey on a hypothetical male or female supervisor in study 1. Additionally, an employee’s behavior is also a critical variable, which means the level of the worker’s viewing of supervisors as higher status. One of the differences is that behavior is one’s act, it can be good or bad and can be generated from a person itself. The efficient way to measure the employee’s behavior is through doing a rating survey from both employee self-perspective and supervisor’s perspective, as the article did in study 2. These two variables are well connected; since, depending on the gender in-group favoritism, both women and men might prefer supervisors who belong to their gender in-group.2

Study 1 started with randomly assigning male and female employees to do evaluations on perceiving the status, competence, and warmth of a fictitious supervisor (male and female) in a financial services company. The result of the first study, by showing Multivariate Analysis results4, confirmed the prediction of Fiske and Glick that women (vs. men) rated a hypothetical female supervisor as more positively on competence and warmth3. By the same token, study 2 examined if employees’ work behavior may vary with a supervisor’s gender based on a real-life supervisory relationship. The authors compared both in-role and out-role behaviors of the employees, together with their perceptions of supervisor status based on the correlation data. According to the data displayed5, study 2 deepened the finding in study 1.

The article explained these findings based on the social identity theory, which originated from social psychologist Henri Tajfel and John Turner in 1979.7 The results from the two studies were consistent with the research on in-group favoritism generated by Dasgupta in 2004. Although all the theory and past research indicated women generate more support towards female leaders, the findings in this article give more evidence that employees with different genders show different behaviors and attitudes depending on the gender of their supervisors. There is also other evidence provided from a social-cognitive perspective by Richeson and Ambady, who concluded consistently with group-position theory “…males assigned to a low-status role relative to an outgroup member (i.e. female member) would exhibit more negative attitudes regarding women…”6 This article also analyzed the reasons why past related experiments and investigations conducted by others failed. One main reason is that others focused more on a hypothetical target but did not blend the investigation