Gender and the effectiveness of leaders: a meta-analysis.

This article presents a synthesis of research on the relative effectiveness of women and men who occupy leadership and managerial roles. Aggregated over the organizational and laboratory experimental studies in the sample, male and female leaders were equally effective. However, consistent with the assumption that the congruence of leadership roles with leaders' gender enhances effectiveness, men were more effective than women in roles that were defined in more masculine terms, and women were more effective than men in roles that were defined in less masculine terms. Also, men were more effective than women to the extent that leader and subordinate roles were male-dominated numerically. These and other findings are discussed from the perspective of social-role theory of sex differences in social behavior as well as from alternative perspectives.

Social loafing and social compensation: the effects of expectations of co-worker performance.

Previous research has suggested that people tend to engage in social loafing when working collectively. The present research tested the social compensation hypothesis, which states that people will work harder collectively than individually when they expect their co-workers to perform poorly on a meaningful task. In 3 experiments, participants worked either collectively or coactively on an idea generation task. Expectations of co-worker performance were either inferred from participants' interpersonal trust scores (Experiment 1) or were directly manipulated by a confederate coworker's statement of either his intended effort (Experiment 2) or his ability at the task (Experiment 3). All 3 studies supported the social compensation hypothesis. Additionally, Experiment 3 supported the hypothesis that participants would not socially compensate for a poorly performing co-worker when working on a task that was low in meaningfulness.