Research on the leadership styles of men and women has found that highly successful women employ more communal types of behavior and a softer style than equally successful men. An article in the June 10, 2002, issue of Fortune provides a good example of a woman whose social style has clearly helped her gain great power and influence in her field.

The article, about the stock research firm Sanford C. Bernstein, described the personal style of the firm's then-chair and CEO, Sally Krawcheck, 37. Sanford C. Bernstein was famous for making tough calls and never pulling its punches. Bernstein would downgrade a stock every other firm was promoting and put out "buy" recommendations on stocks no one else wanted to touch. And the firm had an excellent track record for making good calls, which turns out to be unusual for securities analysts.

How did Krawcheck succeed in running such a hard-hitting, uncompromising enterprise without suffering the punishment many women encounter for rising too high in their professions? What allowed her to become such an effective leader in a male-dominated field without being called a bitch or being sent to Bully Broads? Explained writer David Rynecki: "She has a gracious, refined manner that masks her toughness."

For women who want to influence other people, research has found that being LIKEABLE is critically important – and that women’s influence increases the more they are liked. Since negotiation is all about trying to influence people, this means that women must be likeable in order to negotiate successfully.

You might think that women also need to be assertive to negotiate successfully – able to present strong arguments, defend their interests and positions, and communicate confidence in their points of view. Unfortunately, research has revealed that assertive women are less well-liked than those who are not assertive. This means that an assertive woman, no matter how well she presents her arguments in a negotiation, risks decreasing her likeability and therefore her ability to influence the other side to agree with her point of view.

In contrast, whether or not they are liked does not affect men’s ability to influence others and there is no connection between assertive behavior and likeability for men. Men are equally well liked whether they are assertive or passive. This research  is buttressed by studies showing that women are penalized far more than men for boasting.

The “likeability” issue can put women in a particularly tight bind, because self-confidence, assertiveness, and asking directly for what you want are often necessary to get ahead in the world. Consider, for example, hiring and promotion decisions. Since research has found that women are generally perceived to be less competent than men, women who compete against men in job situations need to counter this stereotype by demonstrating their superior capabilities.

Self-promotion (describing one’s qualities and accomplishments) has been shown to enhance people’s perceptions of one’s competence. But as the psychologist Laurie Rudman writes, “self-promotion poses special problems for women.” Although self-promotion may educate a woman’s superiors about her qualifications, it may make her less likeable – and make her superiors less inclined to give her what she wants.  Women are stuck in a Catch-22 in which they are damned if they self-promote and damned if they do not.

Other studies have shown that men (and sometimes women) react negatively when women adopt styles or communication patterns expected of men, such as acting assertive and self-confident rather than tentative. But research also shows that women fare no better if they don’t self-promote because men judge women who restrict themselves to gender-appropriate behavior as less capable and “unsuited to management”.

Recent research on leadership by Alice Eagly, Mona Makhijani and Bruce Klonsky confirms that we require different behavior from women in leadership roles than we require from men. Men are judged to be equally effective as leaders whether they use autocratic or democratic leadership styles but women who use autocratic styles are judged less favorably than women who use democratic styles.

Sadly, women managers or “leaders” can be penalized for violating role expectations even when they steer a careful course between the extremes of masculine and feminine styles of behavior. In one study, researchers formed students into groups of four to rank the value of nine items (such as a first aid kit and a map) to someone who has crashed on the moon. Each group included a confederate of the researchers (either male or female) who was trained to play the role of a cooperative, pleasantly assertive group leader. As each group ranked the items, researchers observed the facial expressions of the “nonconfederates” in response to the behavior of the confederate leaders.

The researchers found that the students responded very differently to identical behavior by men and women. Males playing the leadership roles elicited more positive than negative facial reactions but females playing leadership roles prompted the opposite response—more nega­tive than positive reactions. The researchers later asked the participants to evaluate the personal attributes of the leaders in their groups.

Across the board, they rated males who had taken leadership positions as having more ability, skill, and intelligence than the female leaders and rated the females leaders as more emotional, bossy, and domineering—this despite the fact that the behavior of the men and women playing leadership roles was exactly the same. However, when the participants were asked directly about their attitudes toward men and women in leadership roles, they exhibited no sex biases and believed that they held none."

Researchers speculate that many people object to women playing leadership roles because their ideas about leadership behavior clash with their perceptions of how women should behave. To study this phenomenon, in the 1970s the psychologist Virginia Schein developed the Schein Descriptive Index, a list of 92 words and phrases commonly used to describe people's characteristics. Using this index, she looked at the correspondences between the characteristics people attribute to successful managers and the characteristics they attribute to men and women. She found that people chose many more of the same words to describe both men and managers (such as assertive and ambitious) but very few of the same words to describe both women and managers. Later research in the 1980s reached much the same conclusions."

More recently, in the mid and late 1990s, researchers noticed that this correlation has begun to change for female subjects but not male subjects—women have begun to see the characteristics of managers as being similar to the characteristics of both men and women, while men continue to see managers and women as dissimilar. A 1998 study showed that males in particular continue to hold extremely negative beliefs about females with senior professional standing. In this study, a group of undergraduates was given the Schein Descriptive Index and asked to identify words that describe female managers.

Although female subjects chose words and phrases such as able to separate feelings from ideas, competent, creative, emotionally stable, helpful, intelligent, objective, self-controlled, sympathetic, and well-informed to describe female managers, male subjects chose terms such as bitter, deceitful, easily influenced, frivolous, hasty, nervous, passive, quarrelsome, and uncertain. Research in Germany, the United Kingdom, China, and Japan has proauced similar results. In each of these very different cultures, men see a high correspondence between the characteristics of men and the characteristics of managers—and little to no correspondence between the characteristics of women and the characteristics of managers.

Taken together, these studies suggest that people's prejudices can powerfully influence the ways in which they respond to men and women without their realizing it. People may observe that a woman functions adequately or even extremely well according to objective mea­sures—the number of billable hours she has worked or the number of clients she has brought in or the amounts of money she has raised—and still conclude that she lacks desirable personal attributes (she's not as likeable, or she's too emotional, bossy, and domineering, or she's too easily influenced, frivolous, and quarrelsome).

This can be particularly problematic in an era, like our own, in which CEOs often become celebrities, as Rakesh Khurana, a professor of organizational behavior at the Harvard Business School, wrote in Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs. In this climate, writes Khurana, CEOs are "no longer defined as professional managers, but instead as leaders," with their ability to lead deriving largely from "their personal characteristics, or, more simply, their charisma."

In an atmosphere in which one's "personal characteristics" (pretty vague criteria) qualify or disqualify you for leadership roles, the subconscious prejudices people hold about women and their lack of fitness for management roles can translate into powerful deterrents when women ask to be considered for leadership positions.

As the psychologist Madeline Heilman writes, "Even when she produces the identical product as a man, a woman's work is often regarded as inferior" because often "women's achievements are viewed in a way that is consistent with stereotype-based negative performance expectations, and their work is devalued simply because they are women.' A woman may be told that she hasn't been promoted for vague reasons—she "needs more seasoning," "just isn't ready yet," or "needs to be a better team player." The woman may suspect that she has been unfairly evaluated, but because the criteria for evaluation are ambiguous, she can't prove it. She may conclude that something about her behavior has put her in the wrong—and that what put her in the wrong was asking to be promoted in the first place. This may make her reluctant to actively pursue advancement in the future.

Other research shows that responses to women may be especially distorted by negative stereotypes when they work in areas in which there are few other women. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, in her influential 1977 book Men and Women of the Corporation, demonstrated that when women are tokens (when there aren't many of them around) their personal characteristics are more likely to be seen as similar to negative stereotypes about women's characteristics.

In a 1980 study, Madeline Heilman confirmed this finding by asking a group of MBAs to rate potential applicants for a hypothetical job. When less than 25 percent of the applicant pool was female, the MBAs rated female applicants lower (and also perceived them as more stereotypically feminine) than they did when larger percentages of the pool were female—showing that women are more likely to be devalued when their numbers are relatively small.

This means that the higher a woman rises in an organization, the more likely she is to encounter stereotyped responses to her behavior—because there don't tend to be many women at the higher levels of most organizations. There are of course exceptions—highly visible and influential women who have achieved enormous success despite the persistent discouragement encountered by so many others.

But these women are exceptions. A study by the economists Marianne Bertrand and Kevin Hallock, which looked at the top five highest-paid executives in firms of varying sizes between 1992 and 1997, found that women held only 2.5 percent of these posts. In an article in Fast Company magazine, Margaret Heffernan, a former CEO at CMGI, an umbrella organization for several different Internet operating and development companies, described encountering a young woman in an elevator when she was at CMGI. After inquiring if she was indeed Margaret, the young woman said, "I just wanted to meet you and shake your hand.... I've never seen a female CEO before."37 This was not 15 years ago, but in the year 2000, and this woman's experience, Heffernan points out, is not unusual. "Most men and women in business have never seen a female CEO—much less worked with one."

Another problem women encounter is that the more power and status involved in a job, the more "masculine" the job is perceived to be—and therefore, as the Schein Index studies show, the less likely people are to see women's qualities as suitable for that work. As a result, women may be perceived to be doing good work only as long as they are toiling away at less important jobs. Once they qualify for and start asking for more important, and therefore more "masculine," jobs, their work may begin to be devalued and their "personal style" may suddenly become a problem.

This could explain why the women who are sent to the Bully Broads program usually hold high positions in their organiza­tions—they're vice presidents, chief financial officers, and senior partners, all jobs that until recently were almost universally occupied by men. Presumably, for a long time these women were thought to be doing a good job, otherwise they wouldn't have been promoted again and again. But because the jobs they were doing were less important, they were less identified as "masculine" jobs—and their presence in those jobs posed less of a problem for their peers. Once they reached positions of significant power in their organizations, positions that are seen to be the province of men, their "style" became a problem.

Until she became CEO of Hewlett-Packard, a staunchly male com­pany, Carly Fiorina's work was highly regarded. Then, all of a sudden, Fiorina's "style" became an issue. As Adam Lashinsky wrote in a November 2002 issue of Fortune: "Internally, rumors began to swirl. She had a personal trainer and personal hairdresser at her beck and call. She'd bought a new Gulfstream IV jet. She had her exercise equipment flown on a separate plane. She treated employees imperiously. None of this was true."

During the proxy fight that ensued when Fiorina decided to merge HP with Compaq, she was portrayed in the media "as a ruthless decision-maker—haughty and cocky." Yet six months after the proxy fight was settled, Lashinsky followed her around for a few days and found her listening sympathetically to the concerns of a group of employees, teasing a sales manager and his boss, and getting an audience of "6000 sophisticated tech buyers eating out of her hand." The impression conveyed is of an engaged and capable manager, not an arrogant, take-no-prisoners prima donna.

Although one might conclude that Fiorina is smart enough to conceal her ruthlessness, hauteur, and cockiness when there's a reporter around, an-other interpretation also seems possible: that in the almost exclusively male world of proxy fights, where women hardly ever dare to tread, the ugly and inaccurate rumors about her behavior were provoked more by negative stereotypes aroused by her token status than by anything specific that she said or did.

  For what research confirms employees would tell bosses - if asked, 
     send an email to  bs@futurevisions.org  with "MWS research on bosses"
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