GENDER DIFFERENCES IN EVALUATION OF PERFORMANCE AND LEADERSHIP ABILITY - AUTOCRATIC VS DEMOCRATIC MANAGERS

This laboratory experiment involved 290 undergraduate seniors (130 fem ales and 160 males) who were taking the capstone course in business po licy in the college of business at a large university. The population of business seniors from which the random sample was drawn consisted o f approximately 3.7% African Americans, 7% Asians, 1% Hispanics, and 8 8.3% white Americans. The study investigated the impact of autocratic and democratic leadership styles on the perception of how well male an d female managers perform as well as the leadership ability attributio ns made to them. It was found that, in general, democratic managers ar e perceived to be much higher performers, and superior leaders when co mpared to autocratic managers. There was some support for the gender c ontrast effect in that the autocratic female managers were perceived t o be higher performers than autocratic male managers. Further, the stu dy found support for the perceptual similarity thesis. Male subjects t ended to evaluate other male managers higher while female subjects wer e partial to female managers in their evaluations. In particular, fema le subjects gave autocratic male managers very low evaluations on perf ormance and judged them to be inferior leaders. The female subjects, h owever, gave female autocratic managers substantially higher evaluatio ns in terms of both performance and leadership ability.