Implicit Leadership Theories – Benefits of Women in Leadership

After working for Allied Global Marketing for 5 weeks, I have decided to analyze my original perceptions of the Field Marketing team and assess how they may have been affected by implicit leadership theories. Implicit leadership theories describe how people interpret leaders and how we make conclusions about the characteristics of other people. Often these theories go unnoticed, as they are rapid, effortless and non-conscious assumptions. Before I started working for Allied, I looked up all the members of the Field Marketing team on LinkedIn. I noted that the entire team is highly qualified and even the newest account executive had 5+ years of experience. I also noted that all of the people on the Field Marketing team are women. This seems somewhat rare in the business world, to have an entire team, in a high profile company, made up entirely of women. This immediately caught my attention because of my understanding of women in leadership. Especially in the business world, various organizational and societal norms and procedures systematically favor men relative to women. This can prevent women from achieving positions of leadership as easily as men. In this case, all of the women on this team had successfully combated the double standard of women in leadership in order to achieve their current job status’. 

Additionally, I’ve noticed how working with a team of all women is extremely beneficial. Overall, women’s leadership styles tend to be more transformational, and transactional rewarding. The director of the Field Marketing team, Melissa, uses a transformational style of leadership to guide the team. In this way, she inspires the team to be productive and work towards team goals. Another benefit of having an all female team is the lack of stereotype threat. Women in leadership often experience stereotype threat when surrounded by all-male groups. In the case of women in leadership, stereotype threat occurs when women in leadership feel themselves at risk of conforming to the stereotype that women cannot lead and then performing worse because they are trying so hard not to conform to this stereotype. In the Field Marketing team, both the director and the account executives have leadership duties, which they complete successfully in part, because they are not impacted by stereotype threat. While this reflection does not speak to the overall gender dynamic of the company, it reveals the success of women in leadership and the benefits of creating all female teams.