Are Leadership Preferences Gendered? A Conjoint Analysis of Employee Preferences for Manager Characteristics in Male- and Female-Dominated Public Sub-Sectors in the Netherlands

Abstract

This article examines the consequences of stereotypical beliefs regarding gender, traits, and leadership styles for manager preferences in public organizational contexts that differ as to the gender composition of their workforce. It is hypothesized that employee preferences for male, agentic, and/or transactional managers relative to female, communal, and/or transformational managers are stronger in male-dominated contexts than in female-dominated contexts. Hypotheses are tested through a conjoint survey experiment among 2,757 Dutch public sector employees in education, police, and defense. Findings show that there is a stronger preference for communal managers over agentic managers in both contexts, independent of the manager’s gender. In contrast, employee preferences for transactional leadership relative to transformational leadership are stronger in male-dominated contexts than in female-dominated contexts and vice versa, also independent of the gender of the manager. The article discusses the implications of the study’s findings for the study of gender and leadership preferences.

Keywords

role congruity theory leadership conjoint analysis gender organizational context

Introduction

Despite increasing representation of women in leadership positions, to date men still emerge in leadership positions more often than women (Badura et al., 2018). Almost 50 years after Schein (1973) coined the phrase “think manager–think male,” this still appears to be an accurate depiction of the situation regarding gender and leadership worldwide. Role congruity theory argues that the female gender role is incongruent with the leader role, which creates prejudice toward female leaders. This prejudice originates from incongruity between the predominantly communal traits that people tend to associate with women, such as being caring and understanding, and the predominantly agentic traits that are generally associated with men as well as with successful leaders, such as being assertive, dominant, and self-confident (Burgess & Borgida, 1999; Eagly & Carli, 2003; Eagly et al., 2014; Eagly & Karau, 2002; Heilman, 2001). Different leadership styles, too, tend to be perceived as masculine or feminine. This leads to incongruence if women apply leadership styles that tend to be associated with men, such as directive and laissez-faire leadership styles (Eagly & Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001). Incongruence between the stereotypical traits people associate with women and what constitutes as a successful leader negatively affects the evaluation of women as actual or potential holders of leadership positions (Eagly & Karau, 2002).

It can be assumed, though, that the incongruence between the female gender role and the leader role may be perceived as larger and more salient in some organizational contexts compared to others, because of variation in stereotypical beliefs about gender roles and leadership across contexts (Eagly & Karau, 2002; K. D. Funk et al., 2021; Koenig et al., 2011). This raises the question to what extent this incongruence is salient in public sector work environments, relative to private sector work environments, and whether there is within-sector variation. More specifically, the representation of men and women in the workforce may affect stereotypical beliefs on gender roles and leadership across sectors and organizations, and, hence, employees’ appreciation of male and female managers (Bishu & Headley, 2020; Kanter, 1977; Stoker et al., 2012). The aim of this article is to examine the consequences of stereotypical beliefs about gender, traits, and leadership styles for manager preferences in public organizational contexts that differ as to the gender composition of their workforce. The research question is: how do gender, traits, and leadership styles of public managers affect employee manager preferences in male- and female-dominated public sub-sectors? To answer this question, we conducted a conjoint survey experiment among 2,757 Dutch public sector employees in education, police, and defense to be able to disentangle the effects of gender, gender-related traits, and leadership behavior on employees’ preferences for their direct manager. The diversity of public sub-sectors included in the sample allowed us to compare perceived role incongruence between male- and female-dominated organizational contexts.

The contribution of this article is threefold. First, theoretically, we contribute to the understanding of the mechanisms behind stereotyping and prejudice toward female leaders by comparing employees’ preferences between different public sector contexts. Rather than assuming that ideal types of gender roles and leadership are universal, the current study discusses how these may vary based on the gender composition of the organization’s workforce and the implications thereof for employees’ preferences for their direct manager. Based on Kanter’s seminal work on the role of gender distributions in organizations (Kanter, 1977), we develop and test hypotheses on how the gender composition of the workforce influences employees’ preferences as to the gender, traits, and leadership style of their direct manager.

Second, methodologically, our survey experimental design allows for disentangling the role of a manager’s gender, agentic, and communal traits, and leadership styles in employees’ preferences for a manager, whereas, to date, the perceived associations between these various manager characteristics remain unclear (Derue et al., 2011; K. D. Funk et al., 2021; Stoker et al., 2012). We use a conjoint experiment, which is relatively new to the field of public management, and which fits our aim of disentangling the effects of a variety of managers’ characteristics on employees’ leader preferences simultaneously. Moreover, survey experiments in public management mostly involve randomly selected citizens participating in online panels rather than experimental evidence collected among employees situated within different organizational contexts (James et al., 2017). The current experimental study conducted across different organizational contexts helps fill the gap and allows us to examine the possible variation in leadership perceptions and preferences across public sector contexts.

Third, practically, with this research, we gain knowledge on variation in prejudice and stereotyping across different organizational settings. A good understanding of contextual and individual influences on gender prejudice may stimulate interventions to prevent gender discrimination when selecting people as managers or evaluating them (Eagly & Karau, 2002, p. 589). When people become aware of stereotypes and prejudices and start acting against it, it is possible to alleviate the perceived incongruity between women and leadership, which may eventually spur the rise of women in leadership positions.

The next section reviews the literature on gender and leadership and based on role congruity theory, and hypotheses are formulated. Section “Method” describes the data collection strategy and the conjoint experiment in more detail. Section “Analysis” presents the results of the conjoint analysis as well as additional analyses and robustness checks. Findings show there is a stronger preference for communal managers over agentic managers in both contexts, independent of the manager’s gender. In contrast, employee preferences for transactional leadership relative to transformational leadership are stronger in male-dominated contexts than in female-dominated contexts and vice versa, also independent of the gender of the manager. This is mostly not in line with our theoretical expectations. The theoretical and methodological implications of the findings are elaborated in the concluding section.

Theory and Hypotheses

Role Congruity Theory

We draw on role congruity theory to explain how gender, traits, and leadership style affect employees’ manager preferences. The concept of gender roles is at the heart of this theory and refers to the common beliefs people hold about the traits of women and men (Eagly & Karau, 2002). This includes both descriptive norms or stereotypes, which refer to how women and men are, and prescriptive norms or stereotypes, referring to how women and men should be. Agentic and communal traits are related to gender, such that agentic traits are more strongly ascribed to men, whereas communal traits are more strongly ascribed to women (Bakan, 1966). Communal traits primarily refer to a tendency to be concerned about the welfare of others. Typical examples of communal traits are caring, understanding, friendly, helpful, sympathetic, emotionally expressive, affectionate, and interpersonally sensitive. Agentic traits refer to a tendency to be controlling, assertive, and confident. Typical examples of agentic traits are self-confident, ambitious, dominant, assertive, competitive, independent, forceful, and inclined to act as a leader. Leader roles are commonly associated with agentic traits (Eagly, 1987; Eagly et al., 2000; Eagly & Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001; Eagly & Karau, 2002; Eagly & Wood, 2012).

Role congruity theory therefore assumes that the female gender role is incongruent with the leader role, as women are commonly not associated with agentic traits. This causes two forms of prejudice against female leaders. The first type of prejudice—related to descriptive gender norms—arises because people perceive women as less agentic and more communal than men. This results in being evaluated as less qualified for a leadership position, as leader roles are commonly associated with agentic traits. The second type of prejudice arises because agentic behavior of a woman conflicts with people’s perception of how women ought to behave, related to prescriptive gender norms (Eagly & Karau, 2002). This means that people expect women to behave communally, whereas leaders are expected to behave agentically. Female leaders with evident communal characteristics are therefore criticized because this is incongruent with the leader role, whereas female leaders who behave highly agentic encounter a backlash effect because this leader role behavior is incongruent with the female gender role (Eagly et al., 2014; Heilman, 2001; Hoyt & Murphy, 2016). Consequently, a manager’s gender and gender-related traits may influence employee preferences for managers, such that male, agentic managers are preferred relative to female and communal managers. Gender and gender-related traits have been associated with leadership behavior and styles which, in combination, may also influence employee preferences for managers.

Transformational and Transactional Leadership

Agentic and communal traits have been associated with different types of leadership behavior, with agentic traits being more strongly associated with task-oriented and directive leadership styles and communal traits with interpersonally oriented, participative, and transformational leadership styles (Eagly & Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001). In the current study, we draw on the distinction between transformational and transactional leadership styles. These are the most studied leadership styles in both the generic leadership literature and public management research (Jensen et al., 2019; Judge & Piccolo, 2004; Vogel & Masal, 2015). They are also often regarded as the most relevant for the public sector (Bellé & Cantarelli, 2018, p. 196; Jensen et al., 2019; Oberfield, 2014; Van Wart, 2013). Both styles are used to get employees to work toward achieving the organizational goals and objectives, albeit through distinct mechanisms (Bass, 1985; Burns, 1978).

Transactional leadership refers to the use of incentive structures to align the self-interest of employees with the organizational goals. This leadership style is based on the use of contingent rewards and sanctions, of pecuniary and nonpecuniary nature (Antonakis et al., 2003; Jensen et al., 2019). Transactional leaders reward employees when they meet the objectives set and correct employees if they fail to meet them (Eagly et al., 2003). The contingency of the rewards and sanctions is important here, which means that the transactions between a leader and employee should be directly related to individual achievements of the employee (Jensen et al., 2019). A distinction is made between pecuniary rewards—such as a bonus on top of one’s salary, perks, and job training—and non-pecuniary, verbal rewards—such as giving compliments for work well done (Jensen et al., 2019).

As to transformational leadership, we follow Jensen et al. (2019) in a focus on visionary leadership. We choose this approach over the common four-dimensional conceptualization of Bass (1985), which has been criticized (Van Knippenberg & Sitkin, 2013). Visionary leadership is considered suitable for public organizations with its appeal to employees’ public service motivation (Jensen et al., 2019). Visionary leadership refers to the creation of a shared vision among employees to achieve the organizational goals. This is done by attempting to transform and motivate employees by stimulating individual efforts and showing individual consideration, with the aim to activate their higher order intrinsic needs (Høstrup & Andersen, 2020; Jensen et al., 2019; Judge & Piccolo, 2004). According to Jensen et al. (2019), three types of behavior are relevant here. First, a visionary leader attempts to clarify a vision for the organization that appeals to and is desirable by the employees. Second, it is important for a visionary leader to share the vision among the employees who must execute it, by clearly communicating the link between the actions and goals of the vision. The last element is to maintain this established shared vision in the short and in the long run. In sum, visionary leaders seek to create, share, and maintain a vision for the organization so that employees are encouraged to share and pursue the organizational goals (Jensen et al., 2019). How leadership styles come across to employees, and therefore influence their preferences, may differ depending on the gender and gender-related traits of managers.

Gender, Traits, and Leadership Behavior

The internalization of gender-specific norms, which stems from the dynamics of role incongruity and the influence of gender roles on behavior, causes women and men to differ in their leadership behavior (Eagly et al., 2003, p. 573). These differences can be substantial, because they may, among other things, influence people’s views about female leadership (Eagly & Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001) and accordingly preferences for a certain type of manager. Agentic and communal traits are not only pertinent aspects of gender roles that can help understand leadership; they also correspond to the traits associated with transformational and transactional leadership (Eagly et al., 2003). In previous research, transformational leadership has been associated with female and communal leaders, whereas transactional leadership has been associated with male and agentic leaders (e.g., An & Meier, 2021; Eagly et al., 2003; Eagly & Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001; Koenig et al., 2011). Increasingly, transformational leadership is argued to become more feminine, because of the relation between communal aspects and the individual consideration for employees to create a shared vision (e.g., Eagly et al., 2014; Fletcher, 2004; Kark et al., 2012). Studies have shown higher congruence between female leaders’ communal attributes and their transformational style than their transactional style (Eagly & Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001). Moreover, in a meta-analysis of Eagly et al. (2003) women used more transformational styles than men, yet in addition to the reward component of transactional leadership. Related findings were found in a study by Antonakis et al. (2003). In a study by Vinkenburg et al. (2011), participants related the leadership style of women with transformational and that of men with transactional leadership. Women may therefore prefer to use a transformational leadership style, because in this way they can conform to both their gender role and their leader role (Eagly et al., 2003). The use of transformational leadership could help to reduce the overly masculine image when women use agentic leader behavior that leads to role incongruence (Yoder, 2001).

The masculinity of the leader role has been strongly established in previous research, as outlined in the meta-analysis of Koenig et al. (2011). They find robust effects for the perceived masculinity of leadership over time and across countries. They did find a slight decrease in the cultural masculinity of leadership stereotypes, though, and conclude that currently, leadership seems to include “more feminine relational qualities, such as sensitivity, warmth, and understanding” (Koenig et al., 2011, p. 634). Furthermore, there is the potential of a female leadership advantage. This is not because of changes in prejudice about women’s competence as leaders, but because of advantages in certain leadership styles (Eagly & Carli, 2003). In combination with the effectiveness of transformational leadership, women may have a small advantage in leadership style that offers opportunities to increase organizational effectiveness (Eagly et al., 2014). However, women are still held to higher standards to obtain these leader roles at all. So before hypothesizing a female leadership advantage, “organizations must overcome the female disadvantage inherent in cultural stereotyping of women and leadership” (Eagly et al., 2014, p. 14). The extent to which women leaders are perceived differently also depends on the organizational context.

Contextual Variation in Gendered Leader Preferences

Kanter (1977) was one of the first to stipulate the importance of the organizational context when studying women in the workplace. She argued that women are perceived as tokens in male-dominated contexts—as exemplary of their gender instead of as individuals. Such contexts lead to higher visibility of women, higher awareness of gender differences, and female role entrapment, invigorating gender stereotypes. People may also think that female-dominated professions require stereotypically feminine traits, and that male-dominated professions require stereotypically masculine traits. This leads to a perceived lack of fit that is especially negative for women when the job is male gender-typed—which may be determined by such factors as occupation and function or level within an organization—and when men are a majority in the organization (Cejka & Eagly, 1999, in Heilman, 2012).

Traditionally, public organizations have been identified as masculine environments (Ferguson, 1984; K. Funk, 2019; Stivers, 2002). However, there are differences in the masculinity or femininity of public organizations. The two indicators of the male- or female-dominated organizational context—cultural beliefs about the type of work and the representation of men and women in the organization—are mostly correlated (Cejka & Eagly, 1999). There is a tendency for organizations in policy areas that are traditionally seen as more masculine, such as defense, police, finance, and economics, to have more male employees. Consequently, organizations in healthcare, education, and social services, which are policy areas traditionally associated with femininity, tend to have more female employees (K. Funk, 2019). Therefore, despite leadership positions being treated as typically masculine and male typed, some organizations are perceived to be more feminine and have more female employees than male employees (Paustian-Underdahl et al., 2014).

Because role congruity theory concerns the stereotypical beliefs people hold about what constitutes as a successful leader, manager preferences are also likely to differ across male- and female-dominated contexts. Empirical research provides evidence that perceived gender differences in the effectiveness of leadership are affected by the organizational context. Paustian-Underdahl et al. (2014), in their meta-analytical study, mostly replicated earlier findings of the meta-analysis of Eagly et al. (1995). Consistent with role congruity theory, gender differences in perceived effectiveness were significantly moderated by whether the organization under examination was male- or female-dominated. Both meta-analyses found that male leaders were perceived to be more effective in male-dominated organizational contexts, such as in military organizations, and female leaders were perceived as slightly more effective in less male-dominated or female-dominated organizational contexts, such as in educational organizations. While these studies shed light on the appreciation of male and female leaders in male- and female-dominated organizational contexts, how gender stereotypical beliefs about traits and leadership styles play a role is not empirically assessed.

Yet, it can be theorized that the incongruence between the leader role and the female gender role will be stronger and more salient in male-dominated contexts and the prejudice against female leaders thus most apparent in contexts that are culturally defined as masculine. Related to descriptive stereotypes, there is a perceived misfit of women’s leadership abilities, because there is a high incongruence between their communal traits and the agentic traits needed for leadership positions defined in masculine terms. If women show agentic behavior, they may encounter a backlash effect because they do not behave “as women should behave.” On the other hand, role incongruence is expected to be lower in female-dominated contexts when leadership can be realized in less masculine ways (Eagly & Karau, 2002). This also implies that the lower the number of women in an organization, the stronger the preference for male, agentic managers. Based on the above, the following hypotheses can be formulated:

Hypothesis 1: Employee preferences for male managers relative to female managers are stronger in male-dominated contexts than in female-dominated contexts

Hypothesis 2: Employee preferences for agentic managers relative to communal managers are stronger in male-dominated contexts than in female-dominated contexts

Hypothesis 3: Employee preferences for male, agentic managers relative to female or communal managers are stronger in male-dominated contexts than in female-dominated contexts

As transformational leadership has been associated with female, communal leaders, whereas transactional leadership has been associated with male and agentic leaders (e.g., Eagly et al., 2003; Eagly & Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001; Koenig et al., 2011), the following hypotheses can be formulated:

Hypothesis 4: Employee preferences for transactional leadership relative to transformational leadership are stronger in male-dominated contexts than in female-dominated contexts

Hypothesis 5: Employee preferences for male managers with a transactional leadership style relative to female managers and managers with a transformational leadership style are stronger in male-dominated contexts than in female-dominated contexts

Method

Data Collection

We conducted a conjoint survey experiment in education and police and defense in the Netherlands, indicating female-dominated and male-dominated sectors respectively. While in education female employees outnumber male employees (67% women), in police and defense men are a majority (64% and 86% men) (Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, 2018). Moreover, police and defense have traditionally been considered masculine organizations because of their agentic culture, whereas the education sector is often regarded as a feminine work context emphasizing communal characteristics (Eagly et al., 1995; Kark & Eagly, 2010; Paustian-Underdahl et al., 2014; Rice & Barth, 2016). There is variation between educational subsectors, though, with institutions of higher education being more strongly associated with a masculine culture (Hearn, 2020; Priola, 2007) and elementary education more strongly associated with communal traits (Croft et al., 2015). The research design therefore allows to additionally compare the results for the different educational subsectors.¹

The experiment was conducted through “Flitspanel,” an online panel of employees in the Dutch public sector coordinated by the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations.² At the time of data collection in April 2019, all 9,094 members of the panel working in education and police and defense were invited to participate in an online survey on leadership. The survey took approximately 10 to 15 minutes to complete. After 3 weeks and two reminder e-mails, 2,783 members had participated in the survey experiment. The final sample consists of 2,757 respondents—26 were removed because of missing values—resulting in a response rate of 30.3%.

The final sample is not representative for the population with respect to gender and age. Of the final sample, 44.5% of the respondents is female and the mean age is 54.8 years, whereas of all employees working in the relevant sectors 57.7% is female and the mean age is 44.1 years. This is primarily due to the demographic composition of the Flitspanel itself rather than to response bias (see Table A1 in the Appendix). In addition, a comparison between Flitspanel and the final sample shows that female respondents were less likely to respond across all sectors. We therefore cluster the standard errors by respondents to control for bias affecting the analysis. In addition, subgroup analyses are performed to see whether the results are valid across groups.

Conjoint Experimental Design

We use a conjoint survey experiment to measure employee preferences for public managers. One major advantage of conjoint experiments over traditional survey experiments is the ability to simultaneously manipulate a wide range of variables (Hainmueller et al., 2014; Rao, 2014). It is, hence, possible to disentangle the role of a manager’s gender, gender-related traits, and leadership styles in employees’ preferences for a manager. Conjoint analysis, originating from marketing research, is increasingly being adopted in other research fields such as business and political science as well as in public administration (Hainmueller et al., 2014; Horiuchi et al., 2020; Jilke & Tummers, 2018; Ono & Yamada, 2020; Raghavarao et al., 2010; Rao, 2014).

Respondents were shown two potential managers with seven varying attributes of two levels each, resulting in 128 unique combinations of manager profiles. Table 1 shows an example of a choice set. Five times in a row, respondents had to choose which manager they would prefer as their manager on a seven-point scale, ranging from “certainly manager A” to “certainly manager B.” Each respondent rated five sets of two hypothetical potential managers, resulting in 27,570 observations (2,757 * 5 * 2) in total. The attributes are randomized per task and respondent for each manager profile, which makes it possible to assess the relative importance of each of the attributes for a respondent’s manager preference. To avoid unnecessary confusion, the order of manager attributes is fixed within respondents, but randomized across respondents to prevent order effects (Hainmueller et al., 2014). Results of the balance test show that the randomization worked. As expected by chance there are no significant correlations between the attributes and respondent characteristics (see Table A2 in the Appendix).

Table 1.

Example of a Choice Set.

Attribute	Manager A	Manager B
Goal	Focuses on the efficient use of the available financial resources	Focuses on realizing the social task of the organization
Self-confident	Is not very self-confident and ambitious	Is very self-confident and ambitious
Caring	Is not particularly caring and understanding	Is very caring and understanding
Vision	Does not clarify a vision for the organization	Clarifies a vision for the organization
Compliment	Does not compliment work well done	Compliments work well done
Gender	Male	Female
Rewards	Does not reward employees	Rewards employees if they perform well on the job

Measurement

To analyze our dependent variable, manager preference, we coded the seven-point scale as an interval scale from 0 to 1, giving equal weight to each of the seven options (see Table A3 in the Appendix). Each attribute, the independent variables, could be one of two levels related to gender, gender-related traits, and leadership style. Gender was coded as either male or female. Gender-related traits are divided into two separate attributes, where agentic is measured as the manager being very self-confident and ambitious (or not) and communal as being very caring and understanding (or not). Leadership styles are measured with four different attributes, in line with the conceptualization of transformational and transactional leadership by Jensen et al. (2019). Transformational leadership is measured by referring to a manager who clarifies a vision for the organization (or not). Transactional leadership is operationalized into a manager who focuses on the financial goal of the organization compared to a manager who focuses on realizing the organization’s social responsibility (transformational leadership). The contingent rewards component of transactional leadership is divided into two parts. The pecuniary rewards component refers to a manager who rewards employees when they perform well on the job with for instance wage supplements or courses compared to a manager who does not. Non-pecuniary rewards are operationalized into a manager who compliments employees for work well done compared to a manager who does not. The use of sanctions is not included, because sanctions are considered less relevant to study in the context of education (Fjendbo, 2021).

Next to the conjoint experiment, various other questions were included in the survey to allow for extra analyses. Directly after the experiment, respondents were asked to rank the seven attributes in order of importance for manager preference. As a robustness check, we compare the order of the attributes from this question with the relative importance of the attributes from the conjoint experiment. In addition, respondents were asked various questions about their background, such as age and gender. Table 2 shows the descriptive statistics for the variables included in the analyses, for the full sample as well as for the two sub-sectors separately.

Table 2.

Descriptive Statistics.

All respondents	n	Mean	SD	Min	Max
Gender (0 = male, 1 = female)	2,731	0.45	0.50	0	1
Age	2,757	54.77	8.58	24	86
Education
Gender (0 = male, 1 = female)	2,266	0.50	0.50	0	1
Age	2,292	54.86	8.73	24	86
Police and defense
Gender (0 = male, 1 = female)	465	0.18	0.39	0	1
Age	465	54.3	7.81	30	67

Analytical Strategy

To test the hypotheses, we estimate the separate effects of the attributes on manager preference and the differences in effects conditional on the attribute gender. We use the statistical approach as developed by Hainmueller et al. (2014), as this allows for estimating interaction effects between attributes. It also allows to easily compare the results for various subgroups of respondents. We estimate the Average Marginal Component Effect (AMCE) of each attribute level on the probability that the manager will be preferred, averaged over any combination of the other attributes. Because of the random assignment of the attributes, which causes the distributions of all other attributes to be on average the same, the AMCE can be nonparametrically identified (Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2015; but see Hainmueller et al. (2014) for a comprehensive explanation). In addition, we estimate the Average Component Interaction Effect (ACIE), which measures the effect of certain attributes conditional on a chosen other attribute, in our case a manager’s gender (Hainmueller et al., 2014). As the hypotheses assume that the effects vary depending on the sector of the respondent’s employment, we estimate the AMCEs and ACIEs for the sub-sectors education and police and defense separately. We subsequently use a F-test to test the statistical significance of the difference between the results of these subgroups of respondents (Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2015; Horiuchi et al., 2020).

For the estimation of the conjoint experiment data, we used the “cjoint” package in R (ver. 2.1.0) developed by Barari et al. (2018) and parts of the R-script from the replication package of Horiuchi et al. (2020). For the main analysis, we used a combined model to estimate both the AMCEs and ACIEs for the outcome variable “prefer.” Standard errors are clustered by the respondent to correct for dependencies of the observed outcomes across the rated profiles by a single respondent (see also Hainmueller et al., 2014, pp. 16–17), and to control for unobserved differences between respondents.

Analysis

To test the hypotheses, we compare the results of the AMCE and the ACIE for employees working in the education sector (a female-dominated sector) and employees working in the police and defense sectors (a male-dominated sector). The results represent the estimated AMCE of each attribute level on the probability that a respondent prefers a manager with that attribute level (e.g., “Gives rewards”), compared to a manager with the baseline level of the same attribute (e.g., “Does not give rewards”). The baselines can be found below “Manager A” in Table 1. The results for the ACIE are the difference between the AMCE-estimate conditional on the attribute gender (AMCE conditional on a female manager minus AMCE conditional on a male manager). Table 3 shows the results of the AMCE and ACIE for all respondents. The results for respondents in the male- and female-dominated sectors are summarized in Table 4 (AMCE) and Table 5 (ACIE) for the interaction effects.

Table 3.

Results AMCE and ACIE for All Respondents.

Attribute	Level	AMCE	SE	ACIE	SE
Gender	Female	0.002	0.0034	—	—
Self-confident	Self-confident and ambitious	0.032***	0.0036	−0.007	0.0060
Caring	Caring and understanding	0.154***	0.0039	−0.001	0.0058
Goal	Social goal	0.054***	0.0039	−0.005	0.0063
Vision	Clarifies a vision	0.122***	0.0039	0.013*	0.0058
Compliment	Gives compliments	0.137***	0.0036	0.026***	0.0061
Rewards	Gives rewards	0.111***	0.0037	0.001	0.0058
Observations		2,757		2,757

Note. Clustered standard errors (SE).

p < .05. ***p < .001.

Table 4.

Results AMCE for Male- and Female-dominated Contexts.

Attribute	Level	Police and defense		Education		Comparison	SE
Attribute	Level	AMCE	SE	AMCE	SE	Comparison	SE
Gender	Female	0.002	0.0080	0.002	0.0038	0.001	0.0088
Self-confident	Self-confident and ambitious	0.026**	0.0089	0.033***	0.0039	−0.006	0.0097
Caring	Caring and understanding	0.161***	0.0099	0.152***	0.0042	0.009	0.0108
Goal	Social goal	0.047***	0.0095	0.056***	0.0042	−0.008	0.0104
Vision	Clarifies a vision	0.099***	0.0093	0.127***	0.0043	−0.028**	0.0102
Compliment	Gives compliments	0.148***	0.0092	0.134***	0.0039	0.013	0.0100
Rewards	Gives rewards	0.137***	0.0089	0.106***	0.0041	0.032**	0.0098
Observations		465		2,292

Note. Clustered standard errors.

**p < .01. ***p < .001.

Table 5.

Results ACIE for Male- and Female-dominated Contexts.

Attribute	Level	Police and defense		Education		Comparison	SE
Attribute	Level	ACIE	SE	ACIE	SE	Comparison	SE
Self-confident	Self-confident and ambitious	−0.016	0.0154	−0.005	0.0066	−0.010	0.017
Caring	Caring and understanding	−0.027	0.0146	0.004	0.0063	−0.031	0.016
Goal	Social goal	−0.009	0.0153	−0.004	0.0069	−0.005	0.017
Vision	Clarifies a vision	0.021	0.0146	0.012	0.0063	0.009	0.016
Compliment	Gives compliments	0.050***	0.0147	0.020**	0.0067	0.029	0.016
Rewards	Gives rewards	0.002	0.0151	0.001	0.0063	0.001	0.016
Observations		465		2,292

Note. Clustered standard errors (SE).

**p < .01. ***p < .001.

Gender and Gender-Related Traits

Hypothesis 1 states that employee preferences for male managers relative to female managers are stronger in male-dominated contexts than in female-dominated contexts. The results do not support the hypothesis, because there is no statistically significant difference in preference for a manager’s gender between the two contexts (Table 4). Hypothesis 1 is therefore rejected. In fact, in both contexts as well as for the full sample (Table 3) the AMCE of the attribute gender is very small and statistically insignificant, implying that a manager’s gender does not affect an employee’s preference.

Hypothesis 2 states that employee preferences for agentic managers relative to communal managers are stronger in male-dominated contexts than in female-dominated contexts. The analysis reveals that the differences in AMCEs for these gender-related traits-attributes are not statistically significant (Table 4). The estimates are almost similar in both contexts and, therefore, hypothesis 2 is not supported. Furthermore, in both contexts, the effect of the communal attribute (caring and understanding) is stronger than the effect of the agentic attribute (self-confident and ambitious) over their respective baselines. In both contexts, managers who are caring and understanding are around 15-16 percentage points more likely to be preferred over managers who are not. In contrast, managers who are self-confident and ambitious are around 3 percentage points preferred over managers who are not. Because the conjoint design enables to compare the relative importance of the attributes and their levels on the same scale, the higher AMCE for the communal attribute indicates employees have a more pronounced preference for communal traits than agentic traits of hypothetical public managers. Interestingly, the communal attribute has the highest AMCE of all attributes, which means that, compared with the other attributes, employees in both contexts consider the presence of communal traits in a manager to be the most important aspect influencing manager preference.

To test hypothesis 3, we calculate the interaction effect of gender and gender-related traits (see Table 5). It is expected that employee preferences for male, agentic managers relative to female or communal managers are stronger in male-dominated contexts than in female-dominated contexts. The estimates of the ACIE, which measures the effect of the other attributes conditional on the attribute gender, are small and not statistically significant for gender-related traits. There is no statistically significant difference for the attribute self-confident conditional on a manager’s gender. In both contexts, the ACIE is negative and not significant. We do therefore not find support for hypothesis 3. That said, subgroup analyses for different sub-sectors reveal that in higher education agentic traits are more strongly preferred in male managers compared to female managers (ACIE = −0.043, p < 0.01; results not shown).

Gender and Leadership Style

Hypothesis 4 states that employee preferences for transactional leadership relative to transformational leadership are stronger in male-dominated contexts than in female-dominated contexts. The results can be found in Table 4. In the police and defense sectors (male-dominated context), there is a statistically significant stronger preference for managers who use pecuniary rewards compared to the educational sectors (female-dominated context), findings show. In contrast, there is a statistically significant stronger preference for managers who clarify a vision for the organization in the female-dominated context compared to the male-dominated context. This means that there is a higher average preference for transformational leadership attributes in the female-dominated context and higher average preference for the transactional leadership attributes in the male-dominated context. Besides, the relative importance of the four leadership style attributes differs between contexts. In the male-dominated context, the effect of a manager using verbal rewards is relatively strong, whereas the effect of clarifying a vision is relatively weak. These findings support hypothesis 4.

Hypothesis 5 states that employee preferences for male managers with a transactional leadership style relative to female managers and managers with a transformational leadership style are stronger in male-dominated contexts than in female-dominated contexts. Table 3 shows that the positive effect of clarifying a vision and giving compliments as opposed to their baselines is significantly larger for female managers than male managers. The findings do not support the hypothesis, though. While in both contexts female managers who give verbal rewards are more strongly preferred than male managers who do so, the difference between the two contexts is not statistically significant (Table 5).

Robustness Checks

We ran three robustness checks. First, evidence of the robustness of the results derives from the fact that they arrive for the entire sample as well as for examined subgroups (Hainmueller et al., 2014). Results for subgroup analyses can be found in the Appendix. The analyses show that, overall, estimates and relative importance of the attributes do not vary very much across male and female employees and age groups which is an indication of the robustness of the results. There are however some notable findings worth mentioning.

Tables A4 and A5 show that gender of the employee does not affect manager preferences, except for female employees having a higher preference for visionary managers and male employees a higher preference for managers who use pecuniary rewards. Regarding the interaction effects of a manager’s gender with a manager’s traits and leadership style (Table A5) there are no significant differences between female and male employees. Tables A6 and A7 show the sector differences for male and female employees. The results confirm the earlier support for hypothesis 4, but also suggest that the findings are partly driven by female employees in female-dominated contexts and male employees in male-dominated contexts. More specifically, a stronger preference for managers giving pecuniary rewards in male-dominated contexts (compared to female-dominated contexts) is found for male employees. Whereas a stronger preference for a manager clarifying a vision in female-dominated contexts (compared to male-dominated contexts) is found for female employees. In addition, the results show that female employees in male-dominated sectors more strongly prefer communal traits in their manager compared to female employees in female-dominated sectors. This last finding seems to contradict hypothesis 2.

Subgroup analyses for age groups compares the findings between employees aged below the mean population age (44 years or younger) and employees aged above the mean population age (45 years or older). Table A8 shows that younger employees have a higher preference for agentic managers and managers who use verbal rewards compared to older employees. This may be due to a maturity effect indicating increasing levels of self-efficacy and self-management as experience accrues (Wolters & Daugherty, 2007). There are no significant differences between respondents above and below the mean population age regarding the interaction effects of traits and leadership styles with gender of the manager (Table A9). Both for respondents above and below the mean population age we find that respondents in the female-dominated context more strongly prefer a manager clarifying a vision, while respondents in the male-dominated context more strongly prefer a manager giving pecuniary rewards (Tables A10 and A11). This confirms earlier support for hypothesis 4.

Second, we tested the sensitivity of the results by recoding the original seven-point interval scale to a choice-based scale, that is by giving a weight of 1 if the respondent chose that manager and a weight of 0 if the respondent chose the other manager. An equal weight of 0.5 was given to all attribute categories shown for both managers when the respondent selected the middle option “Indifferent” (see again Table A3). The results generally confirm the earlier findings. In general, the estimates of the AMCE and ACIE for the choice-based scale are stronger, but the relative importance of the attributes remains the same (see Tables A12 –A15). The stronger effects for the choice-based scale compared to the interval scale is due to the fact that the more nuanced interval-scale leads to a more even distribution of the weight between the attribute levels. That said, some interesting findings regarding differences in manager preferences between contexts deserve attention (compare Table 5 and Table A14). In the male-dominated sector employees have a stronger preference for communal attributes in male managers (rather than communal attributes in female managers) compared to employees in the female-dominated sector. There is also stronger preference for female managers who clarify a vision in the male-dominated context, but the effect is not statistically significant. Besides, we see a stronger preference for female managers who give compliments in the male-dominated sector when using choice-based scale. When using the interval scale, there is also a stronger preference for such a manager in the female-dominated context.

Third, after the conjoint experiment, respondents were asked to rank the seven attributes in order of importance. Based on this explicit ranking variable, the earlier observation that a manager’s gender does not affect employees’ manager preferences in both contexts, is confirmed. A comparison of the relative importance of the other attributes based on the conjoint analysis versus the rank question, overall and between the public sub-sectors, reveals some interesting differences (see Table A16). Transactional leadership is more strongly preferred implicitly (i.e., in the conjoint experiment) rather than explicitly (i.e., based on the ranking), findings suggest. In contrast, transformational leadership is more strongly preferred explicitly rather than implicitly. We do not find notable differences between the sub-sectors in this respect. In both contexts, employees rank clarifying a vision as most important characteristic of their manager, while in the conjoint analysis transformational leadership was ranked as third or fourth. Employees also rank pecuniary rewards and verbal rewards as less important compared to the ranking derived from the conjoint analysis.

Discussion and Conclusion

In this article, we addressed the consequences of gender stereotypical beliefs regarding traits and leadership style for manager preferences in public organizational contexts that differ as to the gender composition of their workforce. Based on role congruity theory, we hypothesized that employee preferences for male, agentic and/or transactional managers relative to female, communal and/or transformational managers are stronger in male-dominated contexts than in female-dominated contexts. To test our hypotheses, we conducted a conjoint survey experiment among employees in male- and female-dominated public sub-sectors in the Netherlands.

Findings show that a manager’s gender does not affect manager preferences of public sector employees. Communal traits in managers affect manager preferences more strongly than agentic traits. These findings are robust across contexts and across demographic subgroups of respondents. Regarding the interaction between gender and traits of a manager, we found no differences between the two contexts, except for higher education where employees more strongly prefer agentic traits in male managers than in female managers. Employee preferences for transactional leadership relative to transformational leadership are stronger in male-dominated contexts than in female-dominated contexts and vice versa, which supports our hypothesis. However, preferences as to a manager’s leadership style are not dependent on the gender of the manager.

All in all, based on this experimental study, gender of the manager does not affect employees’ manager preferences, which seems to be inconsistent with role congruity theory and the existing literature (Eagly et al., 1992; Lyness & Heilman, 2006; Stoker et al., 2012). One possible explanation relates to the role of hierarchy. The experiment focused on direct supervisors. Research shows, though, that for higher status leadership positions, role incongruity for women may be higher because those positions are more strongly associated with masculine characteristics and because women in such leadership positions more often find themselves in a token situation (Eagly & Carli, 2003; Eagly & Karau, 2002; Lyness & Heilman, 2006; Vinkenburg et al., 2011). Therefore, for future research we suggest replicating this study with a focus on managers in the higher echelons.

The relative strong preference for communal traits in a manager found in the current study is in line with recent literature showing increasingly supportive attitudes toward so-called androgynous leadership (Carli & Eagly, 2011; Koenig et al., 2011; Vinkenburg et al., 2011). In addition, Eagly et al. (2014) argue that “one of the most important findings to emerge in the last decade is clear evidence of a cultural change in how people think about leadership” (p. 13). Accordingly, there may be a decreasing incongruence between the female gender role and the leader role, which in turn may lead to attitudes toward female managers to be more aligned with those toward male managers.

Our study focused on organizational contexts being female- or male-dominated and found that context matters for employees’ preferences for leadership style of their managers, but that these preferences were not contingent on a manager’s gender. This leads us to ponder about other contextual influences of perceptions of gender role congruity. For instance, the national context may play a role, with the Netherlands being known for relatively high levels of gender equality. Future research should examine national differences in the perceptions of gender role congruity regarding leadership roles. More specifically, we would encourage replications of the current study in other national contexts that differ as to gender equality and cultural dimensions of power distance or egalitarianism and femininity or masculinity (Hofstede, 1980). Furthermore, various other contextual factors at different levels of analysis may have a distinct impact on perceived role congruence and the appreciation of women leaders. For instance, while gender representation in the sector or organization as a whole may not have an influence on the preference for men or women in leadership roles, existing gender representation in leadership positions may have such an impact. Gender representation in a sector is also associated with occupational and organizational socialization that may affect employees’ evaluation of leader characteristics. In sum, organizational context is multi-layered and multi-faceted and so is its potential gendered impact.

With respect to the literature on transformational and transactional leadership, the results also provide interesting insights. The stronger preference for transactional managers relative to transformational managers in the male-dominated context seems to be driven by the male employees in the male-dominated context and vice versa. Future research should focus more on differences in manager preference between male and female employees in different contexts. In fact, gender differences in employee preferences and needs as to their supervision is an understudied phenomenon (Fjendbo, 2021). This is the more surprising, as research shows that employee perceptions of their manager’s leadership style are an important antecedent of their motivation and performance (Jacobsen & Bøgh Andersen, 2015).

The discussion of the study’s findings also points at its limitations. First, despite the advantages of a conjoint experiment over traditional survey experiments (see Hainmueller et al., 2014), social desirability bias cannot be ruled out. Differences between the explicit ranking of managers’ characteristics and the implicit ranking based on the conjoint results may support the view that conjoint survey experiments may be a promising tool to eliminate—at least part of—social desirability bias. That said, the conjoint analysis did not reveal significant gender differences in manager preferences. While this may simply be a promising outcome of the current study implying that employee preferences for certain manager characteristics are not conditional on a manager’s gender, social desirability could still have affected the respondent’s answers (Nederhof, 1985; Podsakoff, 2003). Stated preferences may not reflect how people behave in actual situations and the current design does not tap into potential implicit biases affecting actual behaviors (James et al., 2017). Especially when it comes to sensitive topics, such as discrimination, survey experiments may not reveal implicit biases. Wulff and Villadsen (2020), for instance, argue that survey experiments in management research are often not as valid as field experiments and urge researchers to focus on replication of survey experiments as field experiments. However, there would be some severe issues of feasibility to answer these type of research questions in a field experiment.

Second, the conjoint design may not have been powerful enough to detect whether preferences for a manager’s traits and leadership style were dependent on the manager’s gender. One reason might be that we opted for treating agentic and communal traits as separate dimensions, which was conceptually most valid, rather than as two poles of a single continuum. The same applies to transactional and transformational leadership (for 3 of 4 attributes). This implied that respondents were not asked to choose between the two types of traits and leadership styles, but, instead, between the two types of traits and leadership styles to be present or not. The relative preference for a trait or leadership style compared to the other was established through interpreting the AMCE effect sizes. For future research, we would suggest to replicate this research by redesigning the conjoint experiment such that respondents are forced to choose between either a manager with agentic traits or one with communal traits and between either a transactional or a transformational manager.

Third, the experiment measures employee preferences for hypothetical potential direct managers with only a limited number of characteristics, which has implications for the ecological validity of the experiment. The vignettes in the conjoint experiment provided only limited explanation, which could have made it difficult for respondents to clearly imagine a new potential direct manager with the suggested characteristics.³ A suggestion for future research would be to delimit the research to specific organizations within relevant sectors and use terminology in the choice-sets that fits with the real-life work context of respondents.

Fourth, delimitation of the empirical study to specific organizations within relevant sectors would also enable to further disentangle the impact of professional and organizational socialization on the preference for a manager’s gender, traits, and leadership styles from other contextual factors. In fact, a limitation of the current study is that it is unable to delve deeper into the role of the work context.

In conclusion, employees’ preferences for manager characteristics are not contingent on a manager’s gender, the current study finds. This is good news when looking at women and men in leadership roles and how these roles are defined. However, we also find that preferences for transactional and transformational leadership are associated with the gender composition of the organizational context. As one of few studies that examine how organizational context might influence the perceived congruence between gender roles and leadership it calls for further research on gender-related dimensions of organizational contexts and their impact on the role of gender stereotypes in employee attitudes to male and female leaders.

Footnotes

Appendix

Table A16.

Comparison Relative Importance With Rank Question.

	Entire sample		Education		Police and defense
	Rank question	Conjoint experiment	Rank question	Conjoint experiment	Rank question	Conjoint experiment
Gender	7	7	7	7	7	7
Self-confident	5	6	5	6	5	6
Caring	2	1	2	1	2	1
Goal	3	5	3	5	3	5
Vision	1	3	1	3	1	4
Compliment	4	2	4	2	4	2
Rewards	6	4	6	4	6	3

Note. Ranking of the attributes in terms of relative importance. 1 = most important, 7 = least important.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Sophie Offringa

Sandra Groeneveld

Notes

Author Biographies

Sophie Offringa is a consultant at Rebel Group, Rotterdam. She obtained her MPA from the Institute of Public Administration, Leiden University, the Netherlands.

Sandra Groeneveld is a professor of public management at the Institute of Public Administration, Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her research interests include leadership, diversity and inclusion, and change in public organizations.

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