Do Gender-Role Violations in Initiating Structure and Consideration Help or Harm Employee Stress and Well-Being?

Abstract

Although prior research has noted the stress-reducing effects of leaders’ initiating structure and consideration, these behaviors are often gendered, with initiating structure as agentic, masculine behavior and consideration as communal, feminine behavior. Given these gender-role expectations, we examine whether there are different implications of women and men leaders’ initiating structure and consideration in relation to employee stress and well-being. Integrating expectancy violation theory and stress appraisal theory, we argue that perceived leader behaviors that violate gender roles (i.e., initiating structure by women leaders and consideration by men leaders) will be more powerful in reducing employee threat appraisals, which then reduces self-regulation depletion and in turn enriches employee well-being. Two studies—a time-separated field study and a set of experiments—support our proposals. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.