SEX AS A STATUS CHARACTERISTIC: THE ROLE OF FORMAL THEORY IN DEVELOPING LEADERSHIP TRAINING STRATEGIES
Authors: Lockheed Marlaine E. , Hall Katherine Patterson 
Published: August 2014

Researchers studying how males and females interact in small groups have typically noted that males tend to emerge as leaders, being more active, influential, and task‐oriented than females. This result has been explained by sex‐role formulations which stress the complementary roles of men and women in such groups, and which largely ignore the greater power and prestige of the males. The theory of diffuse status characteristics and expectation states, a formal theory developed by Berger, Cohen, Conner and Zelditch, is more appropriate for understanding this difference in power between males and females in task groups.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the relative efficacy of sex‐role formulations with expectation states theory in explaining the observed differences in the behavior of males and females working together in task groups. Two studies are reported, one in which the subjects were adult teacher trainees and one in which the subjects were high school students. In both studies the subjects were composed into four‐person groups of strangers and were requested to work together on a cooperative task; the discussions related to the decisions demanded by the task were recorded on videotape and later coded by trained observers. In the first study, only mixed‐gender groups were observed; in the second study, both mixed‐gender and single‐gender groups were observed.

Expectation states theory predicts that when people work together on a valued, collective task, and when they have no prior information about each other's competence at the task, and when they differ on some socially evaluated characteristic such as gender or race, they will assign expectations for competence at the task on the basis of the characteristic. Persons having the more highly evaluated state of the characteristic will be expected to be more competent both by themselves and others and will hence be more influential about the resolution of the task under certain specified conditions. We therefore predict that in mixed‐gender groups males will tend to emerge as leaders, being more active, influential and task‐oriented than females, but that differences in activity between all‐male and all‐female groups will not be evident. Furthermore, we predict that if females have the opportunity to develop task specific expectations for their own competence, they will be more active and influential in mixed‐gender groups than females who have not had such an opportunity. The latter two predictions are not compatible with sex‐role explanations for differences in male‐female behavior in work groups.

The findings of the studies support the predictions. In mixed‐gender groups, males were more active and influential than females, but all‐male groups were not more active than all‐female groups. Furthermore, females who experienced the task in an all‐female group prior to experiencing it with males were more active than females who had not had such an experience.

We conclude that the pattern of male leadership in mixed‐gender groups is not a function of deep‐seated socialized behaviors, but rather a function of socially determined and theoretically modifiable expectations about male competence.