Perceived misalignment of professional prototypes reduces subordinates’ endorsement of sexist supervisors

Despite decades of efforts, many organizations still have sexist supervisors—those in supervisory positions who define their profession by primarily stereotypically masculine features. As a result of their “masculine” professional prototypes, sexist supervisors see their work as a “man’s job” in which women cannot succeed. Research suggests that one problem posed by sexist supervisors is that they may pass their biased views on to subordinates who endorse them as leaders. To make this less likely, we test in two experiments (N = 1,879) a strategy to reduce subordinates’ endorsement of sexist supervisors. We do this by encouraging subordinates to see themselves as low in perceived professional prototype alignment (PPPA)—the extent to which a subordinate perceives their supervisor to share their beliefs about what it means to be a member of their profession—with sexist supervisors. Specifically, encouraging subordinates’ to hold less masculine, more “balanced” professional prototypes, in which they see stereotypically feminine attributes as equally important to the job as stereotypically masculine ones, reduces PPPA with sexist supervisors. Lowering PPPA, in turn, reduces supervisor endorsement, even after accounting for the effects of other established mechanisms of supervisor endorsement. This research sheds new light on the psychology of followership and offers a new way to curb gender bias from the bottom u

The pursuit of information sharing: Expressing task conflicts as debates vs. disagreements increases perceived receptivity to dissenting opinions in groups

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier

Resolving Ideological Conflicts by Affirming Opponents’ Status: The Tea Party, Obamacare and the 2013 government shutdown

Ideological conflicts, like those over the Affordable Care Act (ACA), are highly intractable, as demonstrated by the October 2013 partial government shutdown. The current research offers a potential resolution of ideological conflicts by affirming an opponent’s status. Results of one experiment collected during the 2013 government shutdown and a secondconducted shortly after the implementation of the health insurance marketplaces in early 2014 indicate that status affirmation induces conciliatory attitudes and a willingness to sacrifice one’s own outcomes in favor of ideological opponents’ by decreasing adversarial perceptions. Thesestudies demonstrate that status is an important social dimension whose affirmation by an ideological opponent buffers the integrity of one’s identity, thereby reducing defensiveness andresistance to compromising in political conflicts

Complementarities in employment dispute resolution systems : bigger bang or just bigger bucks?

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (p. 133-147).Organizations face increasing pressure to improve internal conflict management, which has led to experimentation with different types of dispute resolution components. These include: Rights-based processes, in which third-parties determine the outcome of a dispute based on laws, contracts or standards of behavior; Interest-based neutrals, who manage the dispute resolution process and leave decision-making authority to the parties themselves; and Negotiations, which include all efforts by individual disputants to resolve conflicts themselves. Anecdotal evidence suggests that systems combining all three types of dispute resolution components are more effective than any of the individual or pairs of components. To date, however, there is no theoretical explanation or rigorous empirical evidence to justify the regular implementation of full dispute resolution systems by organizational leaders. In this dissertation I present and test two competing theoretical models to explain the benefits of dispute resolution systems over pairs and individual components. The first is an additive model, in which the more types of components that are available, the more types of disputes that can be managed. The second model is a complementarities model, in which none of the components can operate effectively without reinforcement from the other types of components. Thus, performance benefits accrue only when a full system is implemented.(cont.) I test these competing models in a multi-method quasi-experimental and two supplemental before-and-after field studies. I consistently find evidence contradicting the additive model, and suggestive evidence supporting the complementarities model. The effects of exposing employees to a three-component dispute resolution system are: 1) more positive attitudes towards workplace conflict, 2) less conflict avoidance, 3) more conflict negotiation, and 4) more conflict resolution. When employees are exposed to a two-component system, however, only negotiation behaviors increase. All other outcomes were either non-significant or in the opposite-to-expected direction. Although this study is not conclusive evidence of the complementarities model, the data clearly reject the additive one. This study implies that practitioners should focus on introducing full systems to organizations instead of taking an incremental approach to changing dispute resolution behaviors.by Corinne Bendersky.Ph.D