Effects of request legitimacy on the compliance‐gaining tactics of male and female managers

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Abstract
This study sought to demonstrate that observed differences between the compliance‐gaining tactics of male and female managers are attributable to differences in the degree of request legitimacy possessed by those individuals rather than their sex, per se. Four hypotheses, derived from power resource theory and politeness theory, were tested through the use of hypothetical compliance‐gaining scenarios administered to 86 men and 83 women middle managers. The findings of the study indicate that request legitimacy exerts a main effect on both the directness and politeness aspects of tactics employed by male and female managers. As expected, no main effects for the sex of the manager, nor that of the target, were observed. However, sex of the manager interacted with request legitimacy such that the tactics of women in the low‐legitimacy condition produced more direct tactics than their male counterparts, while men in the high‐legitimacy condition produced more direct and less polite tactics than their female counterparts.