A plethora of empirical studies have pointed to the pervasive tendency to associate leadership requirements with traditionally masculine traits more than with traditionally feminine traits. Whereas masculine stereotypes focus on agency – i.e. goal achievement (competence, assertiveness, decisiveness), feminine stereotypes emphasize communal content -- the maintenance of relationships and social functioning (benevolence, trustworthiness, morality). While the think-manager-think-men perspective continues to receive empirical support, as the stereotypes regarding men and women have changed, so too have advantages accorded to male leaders decreased over time. For example, a recent meta-analysis demonstrated that stereotypes of women and men have been changing over time, with male leaders seen as more effective in older studies and female leaders seen as more effective in newer studies. Indeed, a recent study found that women are rated better than men on 17 of 19 attributes that distinguish excellent leaders from average or poor ones . Yet, the gender gap in leadership points to a critical disconnect between research and practice that this project seeks to address; namely, by linking women’s leadership to customer service outcomes, I will develop and test a model that examines ways in which organisations can capitalize on women’s superior leadership attributes to create leadership paths that will ultimately decrease the gender gap. As this research indicates that women’s self-assessments of leadership lag behind others’ ratings of their leadership, this project goes beyond the state-of-the-art by heeding the call of recent scholars, to “triangulate this rating.”
Testing whether servant leadership increases followers’ soft skill development and servant leadership represents an additional state-of-the-art aspect of this project. Moreover, because of the overlap between feminine stereotypes and servant leadership, this relationship is expected to be stronger among women leaders than among men leaders. Thus, an additional state-of-the-art contribution is the examination of gender differences in these trickle-down leadership effects. Further, I test whether subordinates’ soft skills training and servant leadership positively impact customer service and whether these variables mediate the relationship between supervisors’ servant leadership and customer service. Given recent evidence that servant leadership increases subordinates’ customer service performance , I go beyond the state-of-the-art by testing this mediated effect.
