Leading and Being “Through Fire”: Women CEOs’ Identity Work During the Greek Crisis

Abstract

This paper explores how women leaders navigate and construct their identities under crisis. Analysing the narratives and lived experiences of women CEOs during the Greek crisis, we identify five dominant narratives: endurance, heroism, custodianship, sacrifice, and alienation, as central in women leaders’ identity work. Each narrative explains how women leaders resolve tensions triggered by the crisis through different microprocesses of identity work. Our findings illustrate nine microprocesses underlying the five narratives: gender affirmation and identity layering (endurance), masculinization (heroism), cross-domain identity spillover (custodianship), cross-domain identity conflict, exhaustion and loneliness (sacrifice), and gender identity neutralization and disembodiment (alienation). Role metaphors like superwoman, captain, loner/martyr, or antihero, vividly animate these microprocesses. We contribute to better understandings of the glass cliff, gendered leadership, and doing gender under crisis. Our findings indicate partial hopeful agency: women leaders decide how to walk on the glass cliff, moving away from gendered stereotypes and the gender binary.