Women's Leadership Development

Caring Environments and Paths to Transformation

Gelaye Debebe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317418184
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Readers come to the topic of leadership development with multiple interests—intellectual, professional, and personal—and with curiosity about how to apply concepts and tools to themselves and to support others. Women's Leadership Development: Caring Environments and Paths to Transformation addresses these concerns. The book offers an interdisciplinary framework of leadership effectiveness and brings this framework to life with detailed and illuminating descriptions of four leadership transformations facilitated by care-practices used in a specific leader development program. The book will be of interest to academics who teach leadership or conduct leadership research, HR professionals who are seeking fresh ideas for how to maximize the impact of leadership training for women, and anyone with a passion for personal growth and development.

1
Introduction

If women don’t have models of how to lead differently, they won’t have a chance of doing leadership differently.

—Women’s Leadership Series Instructor

The quest to develop talent across entire workforces, coupled with the persistent under-representation of women in leadership positions, has led to increased demand for women’s leadership development programs (Debebe et al., 2017). But a key question in this process remains under-researched, namely, whether and how leadership training helps to improve women’s leadership effectiveness. This book does just this. It explores the impact of leadership training from the point of view of women scientists and managers that participated in the Women’s Leadership Series (WLS), an initiative within a global agricultural research organization known as the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). This exploration suggests that women’s leadership development programs can indeed be successful and that the paths to success are varied and require new ways of thinking about leadership itself.

In the chapters that follow, I describe four types of leadership transformations that resulted from WLS participants’ learning experiences, as well as the teaching and learning processes of the WLS that produced these transformations. Through the qualitative analysis of these processes, I will demonstrate the potential for leadership training to catalyze deep and lasting impacts on women’s leadership growth and will provide insight into the characteristics of the training that had positive, transformative effect.

When most people think of a leader, they imagine a man, and when they think of leadership, they think of masculine behaviors (Schein & Davidson, 1993; Schein et al., 1996; Acker, 1990; Bailyn, 1993). In light of this, the quotation at the beginning of this chapter can be interpreted as not only a challenge to this masculine conception of leadership, but to one informed by the gender binary. The designers of the WLS did not want to embrace the standard, stereotypically masculine model of leadership, but they did not want to promote an alternative, stereotypically feminine, leadership model either. Instead, they sought to create a leadership training experience for women that took gender into account and fostered the development of the unique leadership capabilities of women. Doing leadership differently involves expressing oneself authentically in the context of gendered pressures and other expectations that obscure one’s capacities and potentialities. The purpose of the WLS was to help each participant understand her leadership challenges and unique capabilities, and to discover how she could express her strengths more skillfully.

The WLS was intended to apply management and leadership theory to the gendered context of organizations and women’s gendered leadership experience. This is a significant departure from most leadership programs that assume leadership practice uninfluenced by social identity processes. The WLS was also a women-only leadership training program. This was to create an environment in which women could freely explore their gendered experiences and learn from one another without fear of being judged negatively and suffering negative career penalties.

While interviewing the peers, supervisors, and subordinates of WLS participants would have been one way of learning about the impact of the WLS, I chose to explore the WLS’ impact from the perspective of the participants themselves. Exploring the training impact from the perspective of learners illuminates an often-ignored, but critical aspect of leader development, namely the influence of leadership training on behavioral change through the transformation of habitual patterns of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and acting. While co-workers and other observers can describe the behavioral changes they observe after a trainee returns to work, they would not be able to describe how such changes occur and what they actually mean to the trainee. The learners’ perspective is therefore important.

To understand the impact of the WLS from the learners’ perspective, I explored three broad topics in my interviews: leadership experiences prior to the WLS, critical learning experiences during the WLS, and leadership experiences after the WLS. Interview responses were analyzed to address the following broad questions:

• Did the WLS training effect changes in participants’ leadership behavior, and if so what were the nature of these changes?
• Did these changes enable alumnae to exercise leadership more effectively?
• What aspects of the WLS teaching and learning methodology facilitated learning and change, and why were these aspects important?

Two key themes emerged from the analysis of the interview data. The first is that of leadership transformations, and it addresses the first two questions. Specifically, I found that four types of leadership transformations contributed to greater leadership effectiveness of WLS participants. These are:

• Hidden to visible leadership
• Inflexible to receptive leadership
• Intuitive to deliberate leadership
• Depleted to inspired leadership

Each of these pairs pertains to pre-WLS and post-WLS leadership patterns, respectively.

The second theme is that of creating a caring and safe learning environment for women, and it addresses the third question. As it turns out, transformational learning was facilitated in the WLS by creating psychological safety for women learners in a caring environment that holistically affirmed women’s experiences.

This book situates these empirical findings within a theoretical framework that I refer to as the grounded, dual contingency framework of leader effectiveness. For the sake of brevity, I refer to this framework as the grounded, dual contingency framework. This framework seeks to provide researchers and practitioners with a way to think about the transformation of habitual patterns of thinking and acting in a formal training environment to effect improvement in leadership practice. This framework will be developed here and in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 will primarily present empirical material but it will also elaborate on the notion of care, which will be introduced in Chapter 2. This chapter draws on three ideas from the leader effectiveness literature to establish the building blocks for the grounded, dual contingency framework and applies these to the idea of gendered organization. The next chapter will expand this conception by incorporating the idea of transformational learning and the four leadership transformations.

Approaches to Leader Effectiveness

Although definitions of leadership abound, there is agreement that, at its core, leadership is a relationship of influence involving two or more people (Stogdill, 1948, 1974; Yukl, 2009; Daft, 2011). While some see coercion as a valid influence tactic, others contend that coercion has no place in leadership (Daft, 2011). For this latter group, leadership is a relationship based on mutual influence, and it is exercised when an individual inspires others through his or her ideas, values, and actions (Yukl, 2009). In some cases followers might identify with and support the leader’s goals and vision, while in other cases they may be inspired to pursue their own personal goals. In either case, followership is elicited by inspiration stemming from the leader’s influence.

Researchers have spent decades attempting to understand the factors contributing to leader effectiveness. The trait approach was based on the assumption that effective leaders possessed certain attributes that differentiated them from non-leaders (Yukl, 2009; Daft, 2011). Although a wide range of traits have been associated with effective leadership (e.g., extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, honesty, and charisma) and typologies providing conceptual order to the diverse findings have been proposed (Zaccaro, 2007; Zaccaro et al., 2004; Judge et al., 2009; Derue et al., 2011), the accumulated evidence does not support the idea that leaders possess a universal set of traits. In fact, the opposite appears to be the case: effective leaders not only exhibit a wide range of traits, but also seemingly incompatible ones such as extraversion and introversion.

Given the failure of trait research to explain effective leadership, attention turned to leader behaviors. Early work (e.g., Stogdill, 1950; Bowers & Seashore, 1966) laid the foundation for this research by identifying two mega-categories of leader behaviors: task-oriented and relationship-oriented. Although hundreds of studies have provided support for these two behavior categories, again the cumulative evidence failed to identify universally effective leader behaviors or to show that leader behaviors are direct predictors of leader effectiveness (Yukl, 2012; DeRue et al., 2011; Daft, 2011). In the end, behavioral research findings led to the conclusion that effective leaders employ a wide range of behaviors.

The inability to find the specific traits and behaviors of effective leaders led to a third approach to leader effectiveness. Situational theories or contingency theories posit that a leader’s effectiveness depends on the interplay of three characteristics of context: leader, follower, and situation (Yukl, 2012; Daft, 2011). Some leader characteristics are presumed to be innate and stable (e.g., traits and style), while others are conferred by the formal organizational position. There are also dynamic follower attributes that have to do with growth and development (e.g., needs, motivation, maturity, training) or social influences (e.g., cohesion, cultural diversity). Finally, task characteristics relate to the technical requirements of the job and work and the structure and systems of the organization.

By highlighting the important role of context, contingency theories helped to explain why previous research failed to identify universal leadership traits and behaviors. Some contingency theories emphasize the “fit” between the leader and the context, suggesting that not all individuals will be able to lead in all contexts. Rather, an individual can be an effective leader when his or her innate tendencies are matched with the demands of the leadership context (Feidler, 1972; Singh, 1983). There are, however, contingency theories that have a more dynamic view of leadership effectiveness, where leaders acquire knowledge and skills to improve their capacity to exercise leadership effectively in whatever context they are embedded (Avolio, 2008).

While few leadership researchers would argue with the importance of crafting contextually appropriate and skillful behaviors, some have suggested that attention to context is not enough for leader effectiveness. A leader’s ability to inspire others rests on his or her capacity for authentic self-expression (Bennis, 1989; George, 2003). That is, inspiration occurs when the leader infuses meaning into his or her behavior in a way that conveys enduring commitments—values, interests, vision, and passions (Bennis, 1989; Gardner et al., 2005; Harter, 2002). Unlike the other two leader attributes of trait and style, authenticity is not an innate and stable individual characteristic. Rather, becoming authentic is a learning process that is integral to maturity and the development of personal identity (Keagan, 1982, 1994; Baxter-Magolda, 2008, 2009). Identity development occurs in social relationships, and the capacity for authenticity in identity development involves choosing one’s commitments on the basis of one’s internal sense of self (Baxter-Magdola, 2009). Authentic leadership is built on this and involves the capacity to act on intrinsically resonant interests, values, and gifts while remaining connected to others to bring personal fulfillment and inspire and benefit others (Debebe, 2017a).

The Dual Contingencies of Leadership Effectiveness

The three lenses of leader effectiveness—behavior, context, and authenticity—were used to analyze and interpret the data from interviews with WLS alumnae to answer the question of whether the changes catalyzed by critical learning in the WLS enabled alumnae to become more effective as leaders. During this interpretive process, my perspective on the relationship of these three elements of leadership effectiveness began to shift slightly. The contingency theories suggest that effective leader behavior is attentive and calibrated to context. The grounded, dual contingency framework proposed in this book adds the element of authenticity to that of context. Thus, the dual contingency framework posits that effective leaders simultaneously look externally to understand their context and internally to understand themselves (Debebe, 2017b). In doing so, they craft behaviors that enable them to pursue their chosen interests, values, and goals in a particular setting.

Let’s be more specific. Looking externally (context), the individual accounts for the cultural and political characteristics of the organization, including formal rules, informal norms, and group and political dynamics. Looking internally (authenticity), the individual accounts for their own interests, values, and beliefs to formulate an intention and respond to the context. In accounting for both context and authenticity, the person can be both inspired and inspiring and bonds can be formed between the leader and followers in which mutual influence is exercised in their relationship.

Although the three lenses on leaders’ effectiveness—behavior, context, and authenticity—are applicable to both men and women, we need to consider how these come into play in the context of the varying social identity processes to which men and women are subjected. So we next need to consider how gender shapes the organizational context for women, how this affects women’s efforts to become authentic, and the difficulties this poses for women’s capacity to formulate action plans that are simultaneously aligned with their sense of self and sensitive to context.

Gendered Organizational Context

Although this book focuses on leadership as it is exercised within gendered organizational settings, it is important to recognize that organizations are also built on the foundation of other forms of difference and inequality (Acker, 1990). Individual identity is likewise multiple—women (and men) not only encounter gendered organizational expectations but also those based in race, nationality, sexuality, and social class (Bell & Nkomo, 2001; Debebe & Reinert, 2014; Moorosi, 2014; Crary, 2017). Therefore, a fuller exploration of women’s leadership development would have to address the influence of multiple intersecting identities of different statuses, including subordinate (e.g., black and Muslim), dominant (e.g., upper class and white) and mixed (e.g., white woman). This intersectional analysis would undoubtedly be a very complex undertaking that would need to address not only the shared gendered experiences of women, but also the variations in women’s experiences that stem from unique identity intersections. However, we should not forget that gender is a pervasive, inescap...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figure
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Grounded Dual Contingency Model of Leadership Effectiveness
• 3 Creating a Caring and Safe Environment
• 4 Transformation From Hidden to Visible Leadership
• 5 Transformation From Inflexible to Receptive Leadership
• 6 Transformation From Intuitive to Deliberate Leadership
• 7 Transformation From Depleted to Inspired Leadership
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix: Research Methodology
• Index