Leadership has been studied extensively over the years with an emphasis on leadership traits, styles, behaviors, and skills. Negative leadership behaviors have been of concern to many as they have been shown to affect employees’ well-being as well as the culture of the organization. Some of these behaviors include incivility and bullying. Misogynistic leadership, though acknowledged as a problem in the 21st century, is still an area that needs to be researched further.
The objective of this essay is to thoroughly examine the behavior of misogynistic leaders and the possible consequences on employee performance if they were to engage in misogynistic leadership behaviors. Specifically, the essay seeks to answer the following questions: What is misogynistic leadership and how is it related to organizational behavior? How might an employee react to the misogynistic leadership of a supervisor or manager? How might misogynistic leadership characteristics be linked to the characteristics of those who drop out of the labor force in response to a bad leader?
The excerpt above clearly expresses the need to address misogyny in the workplace. This provides a background for this essay, which is to look at the consequences of misogynistic leadership on employees. Misogynistic leadership is unacceptable in many countries and religions across the globe. Although some countries are inclusive when it comes to equal employment opportunities to achieve gender equality, the above paragraph also provides a thorough introduction to three main inquiries. These inquiries are related to leadership and the outcomes derived from it. Each question will be examined and compared to the outcomes achieved by those women who experienced bad male leadership.
The first question examines misogynistic leadership behaviors while the second looks at employee performance as an outcome experienced by those who have been victims of misogynistic leadership. Moreover, the inquiries will explore and discuss who usually responds to bad leaders. The discussion will explore related theories. This essay will provide a historical overview of feminist explanations for men’s dominance in the labor force and in organizations. In this essay, feminists explain men’s dominance with men’s oppression of women. Other important leaders and contributors that influenced this research are mentioned. A discussion of other relevant theorists in this field is covered in each inquiry.
Leadership, revisited
Historically, leadership is widespread and has predominantly been practiced by men, leading to male leadership being seen as a norm. Especially in more impoverished parts of the world where men are more dominant in society, it is often common to find males dominating leadership positions. Compared to women, they have higher access to organizational resources, hold legitimate authority in their leadership roles, and have available social networks that serve as a resource during their leadership positions. Additionally, men often have leadership traits perceived to be more fitting for leadership positions – traits that have, however, been socialized in a work context and influenced by gender stereotypes present in society. These socially constructed beliefs about male and female assignment have a cascading effect over time and are inherently challenging to change. This might lead to misogyny in workplace interactions and organizational cultures based on society’s values and norms.
Misogyny can be classified as the strong dislike of, contempt toward, or prejudice against women. It is also when men are able to exercise a low level of hatred and intolerance toward someone or a group of women. Uncovering the misogynistic leadership phenomenon became the norm and, as such, could shape the organizational dynamics.
To uncover a darker side of this discourse and pay little attention to those acts that exhibit misogynistic leadership results in directly going against conventional sanctities, which are largely perceived today to reinforce organizational success. Hence, uncovering the minor meanings in misogynistic leadership behavior becomes a necessity for a healthier work arena. The “form” of the discourse about misogyny that is discussed in this paper comes from women’s experiences, scattered throughout the social, economic, racial, class, and ethnic diaspora of this planet. It also draws from the possible experiences of cultural others – men and women. Thus, drawing on this literature, this research seeks to illustrate women’s critical thoughts on the overt and subtle aspects of misogynistic leadership that impact their performance within organizations.
Understanding Misogynistic Leadership
Misogynistic leadership is defined as the set of behaviors exhibited by organizational leaders that are rooted in hatred, devaluation, and discrimination toward women. Leaders who behave in ways that are misogynistic have an intense sense of entitlement, aggrandizement, manipulation, lack of empathy, self-minimization, and can be hostile, particularly toward subordinates. They are excessively controlling, possibly interpersonally aggressive, and they generally lack concern about the impact their behaviors have upon others, particularly their subordinates. Misogynists are people who are generally terrified of normal women, fearing normal interactions with complainants, women, and feminists.
They tend to believe quite readily that women lie about their experiences of victimization and, as such, exhibit disapproval of such negative feminine traits as complaining, dependency, subordination, hysteria, and anger, among others. This is not to say that men are incapable of displaying these desires; rather, when in a position of power, they have greater capability and access to act upon these desires. Recognizing these sentiments is particularly important in the workplace, where positions of power can be legally held by entire groups of people traditionally defined as dominant. Misogynists are also known to create hypervigilance in the women who surround them, simultaneously creating a toxic work environment. Though it was her direct superior who initiated her negative experiences of discrimination, it was outlined that there was a broader culture of misogyny at the company. In these cases, the actions of a leader or leaders helped to shape the environment into one that was particularly hostile toward women.
This article will critically examine the impact of negative beliefs about women and leadership, and the effects of this experience for employees and organizations. Misogyny is commonly shaped by societal and historical construction, and a direct relation can be made between these factors in helping us to understand where hateful beliefs might be fostered in leadership. Attitudes are relatively stable by the age of 30, which is likely to be true for leader attitudes as well. A societal devaluing of women and female work is known to exist. The negative image package of women correlates with hypotheses and expectations of masculine and feminine role spillover into the workplace, resulting in the devaluation of women’s work in both society and at work.
Consequences of these beliefs include public policies that limit the eligibility of women, as well as seminar assignments and opportunities, resulting in fewer opportunities for development and promotion. Power holders are able to legitimize their decisions by shaping the rules of the system, thus perpetuating their misogynistic desires. Societal factors, therefore, clearly help to shape some negative beliefs about women, the consequence of which might have an impact upon leaders. To this extent, we make the bold claim that this devaluing of female work leads to the potential for the objectification and devaluation of women in organizational life.
Focusing primarily on recent comments made about the female nature of leadership, these points are discussed. In sum, we hope to align contemporary public debates about the practice of leadership with those academic debates that contest some of male privilege’s emotional underpinnings. By understanding misogyny as an emotionally charged position, we seek to undo the protection offered by emotional innocence and to instead view leadership as a potentially gendered practice. Both the practical and normative implications that emerge from such analysis are of obvious benefit to scholars and practitioners alike.
Definition and Characteristics
A new breed of leadership is threateningly entering the organizational context. However, it deserves to be identified in this study to fill a research gap caused by the inability to communicate research on the topic as we move forward. Misogynistic leadership is described as behavior exercised by males who lead organizational units including female subordinates, which displays negative beliefs and attitudes toward women. These attributes can evade the definition of the ideas of gender and thus represent misogynistic leadership behaviors.
The description aims to delineate such distinction as discussed definitional and conceptual issues in misogynistic leadership. While workers are not necessarily misogynistic in themselves, a lack of genuine leadership capabilities is a characteristic used to show disagreement between misogynistic leadership and other poor leadership behaviors including authoritarian leadership, destructive leadership, or bad leadership.
In men, misogynistic features are most characteristic and are demonstrated by harmful, nightmarish, or non-demonstrative characteristics such as disrespect for the individual as a woman; skepticism of female capabilities; disparagement and intolerance toward women; and virulent emotions against or mischief toward women. While a misogynist cannot exhibit the majority of these traits, organizational leaders can show some or all of the misogynistic attitudes. Misogynistic leadership expresses the insensitivity, misogynistic behavior, and emotions clustering to every one of these indications. These attitudes may hinder teamwork in organizations. Misogynistic leadership impacts the efficiency and outcome of an organization as well. Consequently, characteristics of misogynistic leadership can be identified, and solutions to potentially counteract them are suggested.
Effects of Misogynistic Leadership on Employee Performance
By now, it’s clear that having a misogynistic leader can lead to silenced employees and a silence spiral, but what about it in terms of the direct performance and behavior of employees? Working under a misogynistic leader can lead to decreased motivation and engagement, holding women back from promotion and innovation. It also has a psychological effect, leading to an increase in anxiety and stress, which can be distracting and take emotional and mental bandwidth. This kind of leadership can also make the work environment more hostile in small but increasingly powerful ways. Employees are less likely to advocate for a new idea and to voice their feedback, which reduces the innovation and learning processes at work. They are also less likely to communicate interpersonally, which tends to hurt their performance on most tasks.
The presence of a misogynistic CEO is associated with decreased collaboration between top management and employees, as well as lower verbal fluency and judgment when discussing business. Microfinance branches led by leaders who subscribe to more patriarchal gender norms would approve fewer loans to women, and the disproportionate loan declines would be to potential female entrepreneurs without a specific business opportunity. In R&D teams, employees reported experiences of leader gender ratio imbalance and salient leader sexism, with sexism being more frequent when men were leaders than when women were leaders. This experience predicts lower employee job satisfaction for both genders and less positive vigor, support, and innovation job performance.
Experience with misogyny makes people feel they do not belong in a particular work environment while feeling disliked and resented. Both overt encounters and microaggressions resulting from hostile sexism are manifestations of feeling like people who are professionally responsible for your well-being secretly do not like you. Discrimination inside the workplace environment harbored by leadership has a number of important psychological outcomes such as a reduction in egalitarian beliefs, emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and decreased creativity of employees. When harsh behavior is perceived, employees are more likely to suffer higher levels of emotional exhaustion, psychological strain, and emotional distress, leading to greater instability when training and functions, and allowing the emergence of psychological detachment from work, feeling helpless, a notable decrease in self-esteem leading to depressive symptoms, and the activation of jobs that tend to become increasingly dominated by negative affectivity towards the men around them.
The basic idea of these “personality”-related theories is that emotions, experiences, behaviors, etc., will either support individuals in doing their best to maintain the social relationships they have or take their toll on them. Therefore, if experience with discrimination is likely to offset the resources that women hope to acquire from work in the first place (such as friendships or promotions), it seems possible that long and consistent enough negative activations of the trust–self-esteem relationship—mostly by uncovering men’s animosities—may eventually lead women to give up the effort to try and screen out those they think may be trying to deceive them.
However, an exploration of the gender/trust/self-esteem nexus has yet to be formulated and tested. In organizations, the social exchange theorist would note that based on long-term job satisfaction attitudes developed over time, the experience of psychological contract breaches—which is the most common institutional form of psychological self-esteem resource depletion—presumably predicts the rate of employee turnover in organizations. Indeed, when long-term employees believe in negative management intentions, and when employees perceive general workplace discrimination, the odds for turnover increase among both men and women.
Contrariwise, when organizations offer employees good working conditions, promotion opportunities, fair treatment, etc., they are more likely to stay. Little room is left for any other motivation to stay. A special type of labor turnover, some would argue, has resulted whenever an individual has spent too long “at Corinth.” The above exacerbating and depleting withdrawal phenomena come to a head, to the extent that, “After years of bad sex with all advantage and no responsibility, direction, that is understanding leadership who cares over the undivided whole person and their career when it is in the organization’s best interest, cannot perform.” From the leader-member exchange perspective, socially skilled leadership exactly uncovers these interpersonal psychological resource relationships where organizations benefit due to the enhanced and more robust performance of employees.
Misogynistic Leadership – How It Affects Workplace Culture
Another key argument is that misogynistic leadership has a trickle-down effect upon subordinates, whereby a leader’s behavior or attitudes leak into the broader workplace culture. Research suggests that organizations are reshaped in the image of the person who leads them. Thus, although there may be a disconnection between organizational ideals and the reality of day-to-day work life, corporate values ultimately come to mirror the leader’s personality and values. In support of this, our primary data from employees revealed that although respondents identified a range of broader cultural impacts, the influence upon leaders appeared to be particularly acute.
Misogynistic leadership is said to invite strong hostility from followers and create an atmosphere in which people are anxious about the competency of their colleagues while simultaneously feeling that other people will not be supporting and promoting for their own good. The relationship between a male leader at any level and his subordinates is therefore likely to be toxic. Current research indicates that employees usually respond to these conditions in a number of different ways. At the very least, it is expected that emotional distance grows within and between working teams and, where the emotional climate permits, there will be hidden resistance to the introduction of new practices from above, accompanied by low levels of innovation and creativity, low levels of communication and collaboration, absenteeism, and staff turnover.
Misogynistic leadership engenders an inner-organizational war of all against all. This is likely to immunize followers against adopting worthwhile, productive behaviors as proposed by the leadership. Employees become desensitized to new changes, seemingly anything to do with the leader’s wishes, particularly when the person in question is either openly or privately antagonistic to promoting and fostering opportunities for women. Crucially, the detrimental impact of these negative emotions is likely to intertwine to form a dense web of discriminating practices through which there is a minority culture of dysthymia. The rest of the workforce learns not to collaborate and/or cooperate with females.
The current preoccupation with transactional management theories defines work relationships in short-term contractual terms. While female employees may be perceived as more “worthy” of support, they are usually the group who are most negatively impacted by the process of rational discrimination. An organizational culture that tolerates internally a leader who is publicly rude, misogynistic, and discriminatory will reciprocally tolerate this behavior in the treatment of current and potential new female employees. An overall result of women feeling unsafe to explore new organizational fields and nurturing existing levels of sexual divisiveness in an organization that prefers to ignore its management’s shortcomings occurs.
The central argument that organizations are interested in preserving their image and reputation means that such businesses are really not interested in promoting the current or future work opportunities of females. To do so would make them complicit in the charge of hypocrisy. Thus, the public, private, institutional, real, and ideal values espoused by an organization are likely to be non-congruent with respect to these values as and when they relate to the gender climate within the workplace. As a supporter of this, there is no business case for hiring women when the female culture is not merely ignored by the employer but is considered unsuitable to the overt and unexplored values of the broader public and of the organization. Apparently, the fact that many women in the national equilibrium do not press for exactly this equality of opportunity and do not press for substitution of the now failing “business case” for change may be taken as a sign of their success and acceptance by the male workforce or their failure and acceptance of defeat in the struggle to achieve higher recognition from the social ideal job.
Strategies to Mitigate Misogynistic Leadership
An effective strategy to combat or mitigate the damaging effects of misogynistic leadership in the workplace could include training programs for both leaders and employees. Training programs, possibly integrated into orientation and ongoing training, should outline the organization’s commitment to inclusivity and respect for all employees, and provide guidelines and information to combat misogyny and support victims. Awareness campaigns and workshops could also be run in the workplace with a focus on recognizing the contradictory behaviors associated with misogyny.
Organizations should consider professional development opportunities, including workshops that address gender-based violence, stereotyping, and societal bias affecting misogyny in the workplace, and how to combat it. Creating support systems and opportunities within the organization is vital for increasing inclusivity at work. Mentorship programs matching mentors and mentees across different levels of the organization might support women’s progression despite the potential formal barrier of misogyny. Reporting mechanisms for employees to report episodes of gender-based violence should be available. Leaders must model positive behaviors within the organization, demonstrating how to respect all employees in staff and public meetings, and integrate inclusivity into organization-wide strategic and research plans.
Organizational policy regarding rainbow workers, women, and work conditions affecting those attracted to work must be clear and unambiguous. Policy should support leaders’ accountability and outline the consequences for disrespectful and excluding behavior.
In today’s increasingly diverse workplaces, it is imperative to develop an effective framework within organizations to address misogynistic leadership. Companies and organizations must establish policies to prevent people in authoritative positions from engaging in discriminatory practices. These rules should reflect the expectations that all employees in the organization have the right to come to work and to work without harassment or gender discrimination. Having procedures in place to deal with allegations of misconduct signals to employees that the organization will not tolerate such behavior. The mere act of establishing such procedures is an example of an organization taking steps to demonstrate its professional character. Developing a training program aimed at those exhibiting misogynistic behavior can facilitate changes in their behavior and attitudes.
The involvement of managers in organizations is crucial in setting the appropriate tone. Leadership character may also influence a company’s image and its capacity to attract successful employees. Companies that take diversity seriously commit time, money, and resources to developing and implementing diversity programs, and this commitment can enhance the attractiveness of a company to potential employees and foster a sense of workplace inclusion among employees, positively affecting workplace performance and ethics.
Many multinationals have established and are institutionalizing systems for measuring accountability for employment practices at all of their operating units since laws across countries in which a multinational operates can be inconsistent. Some companies conduct workplace practice audits at the same sites on an annual basis to ensure that changes are being made and good corporate stewardship is being practiced. The development of effective organizational policies in the workplace can establish standards to govern managerial conduct and help to prevent some of these abuses even before they occur.
Whether considering ambivalent executives being perceived as negative, misogynistic supervisors being seen as transformative, or simply as self-maximizers, our essay provides initial insights into how different facets of such ambivalent and negative leadership styles relate to employees’ task performance and their proactive engagement in the workplace. Notably, misogynistic leadership was robustly linked with decreased employee performance on both of these aspects. Moreover, increased stress, moderated by cultural differences, explained reductions in employees’ genuinely discretionary commitment and in-role performance. The efforts needed to implement purposefully harmful leadership stem from classical path-goal theory, indicating that the phenomenon is not simply an anecdote or some socially desirable self-reporting.
Even though women can be misogynists or value work over family as much as men, the psychological and narrow cultural impacts of thinking someone is in the leadership position because they are attractive, ambitious, cheap to hire, deceitful in promoting hidden interests, a liability for starting a family, and so on, are likely to be more severe and painful for women in most Western organizations. The stark numbers of how rare women are in choosing each of these career-facilitating styles exemplify their constraining power and the organizational work needed to alter them. A starting point could be raising more eyebrows in public.
In conclusion, organizations need to start thinking about these subtle day-to-day managerial behaviors and how they normalize sexism and support more resistantly gynocentric leadership roles because they clearly foster an environment that promotes a less diverse talent pool, higher employee turnover, and lower yields on diversity research. A final aspect yet to be researched is why these engaged employees stay in the organization, especially as cultures change and disagree with their anti-gender biases. Future research areas that move beyond the impact of misogynistic leadership on employees’ performance and work engagement include biased leader hiring and promotion and further prosocial leadership behaviors of the misogynist, such as extra-role behaviors or organizational citizenship behaviors. In conclusion, we call on fellow researchers to further explore these research directions toward eliminating these pockets of inequity within managerial ranks.
