Race, Gender, and Leadership

Re-envisioning Organizational Leadership From the Perspectives of African American Women Executives

Patricia S. Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135613983
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Much has been written about a model of leadership that emphasizes women's values and experiences, that is in some ways distinct from male models of leadership. This book redirects the focus to a view of leadership as a multicultural phenomenon that moves beyond dualistic notions of "masculine" and "feminine" leadership, and focuses more specifically on leadership as the management of meaning, including the meanings of the notion of "organizational leader."
This volume focuses on leadership "traditions" revealed in the history of Black women in America and exemplified in the leadership approaches of 15 African American women executives who came of age during the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960's and 1970's and climbed to the top of major U.S. organizations. It advances a vision of organizational leadership that challenges traditional masculine and feminine notions of leadership development and practice, providing insights on organizational leadership in the era of post-industrialization and globalization. Additionally, by placing African American women at the center of analysis, this book provides insights into the ways in which race and gender structure key leadership processes in today's diverse and changing workplace. It is a must-read for scholars and researchers in organizational communication, management, leadership, African American studies, and related areas.

III

African American Women Executives and 21st-century Organizational Leadership: Deconstructing “Masculine” and “Feminine” Leadership, Embracing Duality in Leadership Practice

Part III brings together the major themes of this book, demonstrating that the leadership traditions revealed in the history of Black women in America are exemplified in contemporary African American women’s leadership approaches. Drawing upon case studies of 15 African American women executives who came of age during the era of the Civil Rights and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, I demonstrate how these traditions can inform leadership in the context of 21st-century organizations. The contemporary vision of organizational leadership that emerges from the women’s experiences disrupts traditional masculine and feminine notions of leadership and other leadership dualisms, and shifts the focus to a both/and approach to leadership practice in the era of postindustrialization and globalization.

CULTURAL TRADITIONS OF RESISTANCE AND CHANGE: FOCUSING ON CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN AS ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERS

The leadership traditions revealed in the history of Black women in America are exemplified in the experiences of the women executives who participated in this research. The focus on African American women in management (as opposed to women at various levels of the organization) is intended as a counter narrative to the gender and leadership studies that focus almost exclusively on White women in management. Although recently, some scholars have studied African American women in management, they have not emphasized leadership as a primary focus (see Bell & Nkomo, 2001; Etter-Lewis, 1993; Nkomo, 1992; Thomas & Gabarro, 1996). Similar to much of the research on organizational leadership, these works focus on management as opposed to leadership (Rost, 1991), and tend to center on career advancement in the corporate sector. However in this book, I focus on African American women’s tradition of leadership in the context of formal organizations.

The personal histories of each of the women reveal the influence of their mothers, fathers, “othermothers,” and contemporary and ancestral others in their extended families and communities that strengthened their identity as Black women and that influenced their approaches to leadership (Parker, 1997). The recurring theme across the women’s narratives—whether they were born into working class or middle- and upper class families—was “Don’t forget where you came from,” referring to the history of struggle, survival, and triumph in African American experience. I quote two examples at length, to emphasize the salience of the women’s narratives in creating their sense of tradition and leadership.

One executive, the senior administrator for a large federal government agency, described how traditions from her Black upper class family instilled in her the traditions of religion and service to the community:

There is so much unspoken. I knew that we were special. I knew that we were different. I knew that we had advantage, but with awareness of whatever this specialness was, came the obligation to do for and to give to and support others, especially in education. Very traditional family with strong roots to the church and public activism. My grandfather was a physician. My grandmother on that side, my maternal grandmother, had the distinction of helping to build public support for the first public library for Negroes, as we were then called…. So, the family tradition was of leadership and also a great sense of responsibility for the broader community. I have recollection of [my maternal] grandmother whose back porch was always filled with clothing, clean, folded clothing in sizes that she routinely gave to others…. And she was always identifying people, some of whom were in her employ, worked in her res-taurant, who needed help. She brought thirteen of her relatives out of that almost plantation-like environment in southwest Virginia, to see them educated as well. And so, that’s sort of the tradition of the family.

Emphasizing more recent family history, another executive, director of a major revenue generating division of a national communications company, told the story of how her parents instilled in her the courage to confront systems of oppression, even if it meant standing alone:

My parents were always involved and they were always committed to making a difference. I say that because I can remember at a very young age my mother and father were involved in the Civil Rights Movement. I always knew my parents were not afraid. They were never afraid of leadership. They were never afraid of taking a difficult stand…I think that is what definitely probably developed most of my personality. When I was in the second grade they sent me to a school that at the time was predominantly White and by that I mean there was two Blacks, me and my next door neighbor. It was way before [schools were legally integrated]…and so they always stepped out ahead and made me do the difficult thing for whatever reason. They had to write letters and had to, you know, they had to go through a bunch of mess, but I mean of course they couldn’t keep us out…. And I remember crying and being very upset and telling my mother I don’t want to be going to a White school. My mother said, “Don’t worry; it’s not White it’s red brick.” And so that kind of helped shape my ideas. You know, in terms of it’s okay to stand alone. It’s okay to do the difficult thing because, you know, this is life. So that’s the leadership thing for me.

Even with the diversity in geographic location and socioeconomic status, there are striking similarities in the ways these executives learned leadership and, subsequently, the ways in which they enact leadership within dominant culture organizations. This reinforces an organic view of Black culture providing the threads that tie the women’s experiences together. In recounting their life histories, the executives emphasized the inner strength and knowledge they gained through the messages and interpersonal influence from their parents and other significant adults in their lives. These messages and sources of influence served as a powerful force that helped them meet successfully the challenges and opportunities they encountered throughout their careers, and that strengthened their capacities for leadership.

21st-century Organizations as a Context for African American Women’s Leadership Traditions: Illuminating the Centrality of Race in Organizing

I argue that the context from which African American women’s leadership traditions emerged is one that necessitated creating community, embracing change, and resisting ideological domination, in a multicultural, fragmented, and power-based social world. These same conditions are recreated in the postindustrial workplace, where identities and relationships are not fixed but must be negotiated in a social world that is for everyone—people of both sexes and of different gender identities, ethnicities, races, classes, sexual orientations—increasingly fragmented and disconnected (Fairclough, 1992; Giddens, 1991). The postindustrial workplace is increasingly fragmented, multicultural and fundamentally raced, gendered, and classed (Parker, 2003).

Yet, as Prasad, Mills, Elmes, and Prasad (1997) argued, organizations continue to advance and value monoculturalism, even as there is an emphasis on multiculturalism through diversity initiatives. Prasad et al. reviewed the vast literature on workplace diversity, focusing on a number of different dimensions, such as gender, race, ethnicity, migrancy and immigration, colonialism, and globalization. They concluded that despite the proliferation of research on discrimination, the value of diversity, and multiculturalism in organizations, the literature fails to address the more serious dimensions of difference in organizations (vs. Allen, 2004). The authors contend that a host of gender conflicts, race tensions, and cultural frictions lie hidden in the shadows of the elaborate showcasing of the diversity movement.

Focusing on African American women executives’ experiences negotiating their identities within raced and gendered interaction contexts reveals some insights about race tensions and cultural frictions in the contemporary workplace. As reported in a previous analysis of data from this study, the women perceived challenges related to their identity as Black women in two salient interaction contexts: interacting with their White male executive peers, and interacting with African American co-workers and clients (Parker, 2002). In both these contexts the conflicts centered on perceived expectations about the relationship and the women’s identity as African American women. Salient conflicts involving White male peers centered on the issue of inclusiveness or fit. The women perceived that their colleagues’ unspoken assumptions about their presence as African American women in a traditionally White male setting sometimes reinforced patterns of interaction that challenged or undermined the women’s authority. The women understood these instances as misguided assumptions that simply needed to be set straight. In more theoretical terms, their colleagues’ actions might be viewed as structured by a system that reproduces monoculturalism. The men themselves may have been committed to diversity at the executive level, but their interaction with the women was influenced by established patterns of raced and gendered discourses that shaped the way they responded.

It was the African American women who were instrumental in expressing the struggle, identifying and defining perceptions of the salient elements of the conflict, and ensuring a negotiated resolution. This reinforces the importance of centering marginalized voices as a way of disrupting discourses that exclude rather than invite participation. Significantly, the women’s White male colleagues, unaware of how their own interaction might be perceived as contributing to creating the conflict, were positioned to avoid such self-reflection and intellectual work. However, in the instances reported by the women in this study, the men willingly engaged in the process once it was brought to the foreground (Parker, 2002).

Similarly perceived problematic interactions between the executives and other African Americans both inside and outside the organization are influenced by larger cultural discursive texts. Focusing on the sociohistorical context that gave rise to racial solidarity as one response to oppressive structures in U.S. American society, race can be seen as a way of structuring interactions between and among African Americans in dominant culture organizations, forcing them into dualistic discourses of Black nationalism or assimilationism, or being Black-identified or White-identified. The women expressed a degree of ambivalence about their strategies for managing the conflict, yet they seemed fully aware of the salience of intraracial differences in the contemporary workplace. This ambivalence can be interpreted as indicative of an ongoing process among African Americans in general and African American women in particular, for rearticulating the basis for collective bonding (hooks, 1990).

The emphasis on monoculturalism in the workplace presumes an absence of racial, gender, and class conflict (Prasad et al., 1997). Yet the accounts of raced and gendered interaction experiences from African American women executives in this study reveal that, as workforce diversity increases, there is a need for processes that help organizational members work through the politics and contradictions of their own background experiences, identity, and preconceived notions as they encounter others who are different. The purpose of leadership in such a context is to facilitate dialogue in which each person is empowered to resist domination and oppression, as she or he comes to understand the contribution they can make, if any, to what they perceive as the collective endeavor of organizing. I argue that African American women’s traditions of leadership and organizing provide a way of envisioning this process.

The following chapters present a re-envisioning of leadership conceptualized from the standpoints of the African American women executives who participated in this study. It is based on the ideas that African American women’s approaches to leadership (a) emerge from a particular way of viewing complex, often contradictory, life experiences; and (b) provide an exemplar of a meaning-centered approach to leadership in 21st-century organizations that deconstructs traditional notions of masculine and feminine leadership. In these chapters, I target central dualistic notions that lie at the heart of traditional, Western (White middle class) notions of feminine versus masculine leadership: instrumentality versus collaboration and control versus empowerment. In so doing, I shift the focus to a both/and approach that captures some of the tensions and paradoxes in the leadership process.

5

Re-Envisioning Instrumentality as Collaboration

This chapter presents an overview of the leadership approach derived from case studies of 15 African American women executives and their co-workers. In total, the leadership communication themes revealed in this study challenge the dichotomous notions of instrumentality and collaboration advanced in the gender and leadership literature. This chapter provides a brief overview of each of the themes and how they inform an approach to leadership that disrupts traditional masculine and feminine models. Then, in Chapter 6, I discuss the themes in more detail, including the voices of the executives and their coworkers. In both chapters, I show how the women’s leadership communication represents a meaning-centered approach that emphasizes both individual and relational (systems) concerns (Fairhurst, 2001).

As mentioned in Chapter 2, two competing leadership models are advanced—masculine instrumentality versus feminine collaboration—based almost exclusively on studies of White women and men but presented as racially and culturally neutral (Parker & ogilvie, 1996). The masculine model of leadership is theorized as representative of male values, such as distance and detachment (Marshall, 1993), and men are said to be socialized to use instrumental communication—unilateral, directive and aimed at controlling others—which is consistent with their learned view of talk as a way to assert self and achieve status (Eagly & Karau, 1991). Common symbolic representations of the masculine leadership model include characteristics such as aggressiveness, independence, risk-taking, rationality, and intelligence (Collins, 1998b; Connell, 1995).

The feminine model of leadership is associated with female values, such as nurturance and support (Marshall, 1993) and are thought to be a reflection of traditionally defined White middle-class women’s socialized patterns of collaborative communication (Helgesen, 1990, Lunneborg, 1990; Rosener, 1990), Common symbolic representations of this model include characteristics such as nurturance, compassion, sensitivity to others’ needs, and caring (Collins, 1998b; Grant, 1988).

Universalizing masculine and feminine models of leadership based on Western (White-middle and upper-class) gendered identities excludes the experiences of other groups and renders them nonlegitimate or peripheral in the production of knowledge. It also “dangerously romanticizes women’s values, the family, the separation of ‘domestic’ and ‘public’ spheres…and the interplay of family dynamics and legal systems to challenge these images of male and female” (Calàs & Smircich, 1996, p. 241). More generally, these competing models unnecessarily reinforce dualistic thinking about leadership, obscuring the meanings, tensions, and paradoxes of leadership as it is realized in practice (Fairhurst, 2001). The findings of this study challenge these trends by deconstructing and presenting a revision of traditional not...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Lea’s Communication Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Re-Envisioning Leadership in the Postindustrial Era
• I: The Need for Race- and Gender-Inclusive Visions of Leadership in the Postindustrial Era
• II: African American Women: An Untapped Source of Leadership Knowledge
• III: African American Women Executives and 21st-Century Organizational Leadership: Deconstructing “Masculine” and “Feminine” Leadership, Embracing Duality in Leadership Practice
• Appendix A: Interview Protocols
• References