Sex Differences in Attitudes toward Leaders' Display of Authoritarian Behavior

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Recent studies of differences in attitudes of men and women suggested that women might possess the “authoritarian” trait of ethnocentricism to a greater degree than men and might therefore exhibit and find approval for more authoritarian behavior in leadership roles than men do. Analysis of men and women non-leaders' descriptions of leaders' actual and ideal behavior fails to support this hypothesis. In general, the opposite is true. Men leaders exhibit and find approval for more authoritarian behavior than women, especially in using power to keep individual members in conformity with group norms and in controlling group goals. Women leaders exceed men in authoritarian behavior only in the more passive sense of exhibiting the correct ritual forms of group activity to the members and persuading them of a rosy future. Though high correlations were found between members' descriptions of how leaders actually behave and how they should behave, negligible relations were found between the latter two and members' descriptions of the desired personal characteristics of good leaders.

This publication has 6 references indexed in Scilit: