Ivona Hideg

As COVID-19 was a highly novel virus in 2019, it brought risks that are difficult to quantify and rampant uncertainty to the fore. We focus on how leaders navigate such an uncertain context. Drawing upon appraisal theories of emotions, we first argue that under the context of high uncertainty, leaders experience emotions relating to their perceptions of (un)controllability: anxiety and hope. We predict that these have differential behavioural consequences; leaders’ anxiety about the pandemic relates to abusive supervision, whereas leaders’ hope relates to family-supportive supervision. Integrating research on gender roles, we theorize that counter to common stereotypes, men’s leadership would be more affected by their emotions. At the same time, women would provide leadership behaviours needed by their followers irrespective of their emotions; namely, refraining from abusive and providing family-supportive supervision. Our hypotheses were supported using a sample of 137 leader-follower dyads in the early phases of the pandemic. Our research has significant implications for appraisal theories of emotions by demonstrating that the behaviours of women, compared to men, may be less affected by their emotions. These findings present a significant departure from previous literature by revealing an important boundary condition of appraisal theories of emotions.

Organizations have started more progressively using and offering family benefits including parental leaves to address the issues of balancing work and family life. Although such leaves are fundamental for supporting, attracting, and retaining women, we examine whether such leaves may also inadvertently affect women’s careers in occupations that overly value masculine traits, unless managed carefully. Drawing on the literature on gender stereotypes (micro factors) and occupation gender type (macro factors), we argue that longer (vs. shorter) parental leaves negatively affect women’s work outcomes (i.e., annual income, salary recommendation, hireability, and leadership effectiveness) in men-dominated but not in women-dominated occupations because it lowers perceptions of women’s agency. We find support for our hypotheses across three studies in the Australian context with an archival data set and two experiments. Our work shows that men-dominated organizational structures reinforce traditional gender stereotypes, whereas such reinforcement does not happen in women-dominated organizational structures. Our research equips leaders and organizations with insights into the unintended negative consequences of parental leave for women. This understanding serves as a crucial first step in developing strategies and programs to mitigate these effects, thereby supporting women in men-dominated occupations and fostering more inclusive and healthy workplaces.

Research on diversity in organizations has mostly focused on attributes that rely on visual cues (e.g., gender, race, age) and overlooked an important source of difference that relies on auditory cues – accents. However, workers with non-standard accents (i.e., non-native accents, regional accents) often experience discrimination and negative outcomes at work. We first review prior accent research suggesting that these negative effects can be explained by stereotypes/stigmatization or lower processing fluency. We then identify three emerging topic areas and suggest future research directions in each domain: intersectionality, organizational language policies and practices, and investigation of a greater range of accents and languages.

Women-led startups are evaluated less favorably than men-led startups, but the reasons for this require further investigation. Drawing on ambivalent sexism theory, we posit that benevolent sexism undermines gender equity in startup evaluation. We initially expected benevolent sexism to be negatively related to evaluations of women-led startups. Surprisingly, we found that benevolent sexism is unrelated to evaluations of women-led startups but is positively related to those of men-led startups—a finding that was replicated in two additional studies. Our work demonstrates benevolent sexism as an advantaging mechanism of inequity in entrepreneurship that boosts men’s outcomes without directly harming women’s outcomes.

Despite longstanding recognition that organisations are open systems that are affected by the broader environments in which they are situated, scholars have rarely examined how such macrosocietal conditions may influence processes and experiences within the workplace. Integrating research on selective incivility and mega-threats, we conceptualise the COVID-19 pandemic as a racial mega-threat and examine how this context may challenge organisations’ efforts to promote diversity and inclusion. Specifically, we predict that the protective benefits of diversity climate against incivility, an insidious form of modern discrimination incited by the COVID-19 pandemic, will be weaker for workers of Chinese descent compared to workers from other Asian subgroups, leading to more downstream negative outcomes for this group of workers (i.e., higher turnover intentions, poorer job performance and greater emotional exhaustion). This reflects the fact that workplaces are not impervious to the rising xenophobia toward China and Chinese people, who were particularly blamed and stigmatised for the emergence of this virus, as evident in North American society in early 2020. We found support for our predictions in a three-wave, time-separated study of Asian workers (N = 248) in the US and Canada during the first wave of the pandemic.

Although many workers speak with a non-native English accent, our understanding of this phenomenon is limited because prior work predominantly focused on men. This overlooks whether the biases women experience due to their accent manifests differently. To address this omission, we use an intersectional lens to examine how non-native accents associated with more gender-traditional countries may affect women’s hiring outcomes. We argue that the bias women with these accents face is subtle due to an association of non-native (vs. native) accents with perceptions of women’s warmth (whereas there are no such effects for men) and consequently higher perceptions of hireability. Yet we posit that the indirect effect on hireability occurs within feminine, but not masculine, industries, which ultimately undermines equity by pushing women with these non-native accents into lower pay and prestige occupations. We found support for our hypotheses in three vignette-based experiments conducted in Canada using a Mandarin accent. Managers and decision-makers need to be aware of the insidious bias women with these non-native accents experience because it may not be immediately apparent that an association of accent with higher ratings of warmth may undermine women at work. Additional online materials for this article are available on PWQ’s website at Supplementary Material

Speaking with a non-native English accent at work is a prevalent global phenomenon. Yet, our understanding of the impact of having a non-native accent at work is limited, in part because research on accents has been multidisciplinary, fragmented, and difficult for scholars to access and synthesize. To advance research on accents in the workplace, we provide an interdisciplinary and integrative review of research on non-native accents drawing from the communications, social psychology, and organizational sciences literatures. First, we briefly review the dominant approaches taken in each literature. Second, we organize and integrate extant research findings using a 2 × 2 framework that incorporates the two main theoretical perspectives used to explain the effects of accents—stereotypes and processing fluency—and the two primary categories of workplace outcomes examined—interpersonal (i.e., others’ evaluations of speakers with non-native accents, such as hiring recommendations) and intrapersonal (i.e., non-native-accented speakers’ own evaluations and experiences, such as sense of belonging). To facilitate future research, we end by articulating a research agenda including theoretical and methodological expansions related to the study of accents, identifying critical moderators, adopting an intersectional approach, and studying group-level and potential positive effects of speaking with non-native accents.

Gender equality issues have witnessed an unprecedented public interest and social debate in the second decade of the 21st century. Yet, despite this attention and many gender-related social movements, gender inequality persists, especially in the workplace. We believe that industrial-organisational (I-O) psychology and management scholars have the unique expertise to tackle these issues by conducting innovative research in this area and contributing insights into the current public discourse and policymaking. To encourage more work in this area and stimulate an innovative agenda for future workplace gender equality work, we first provide a descriptive overview of gender equality research published in the past 2 decades in leading, highly relevant, and valued journals by I-O and management scholars. Next, we provide insights for future research, starting with theoretical and methodological considerations. In particular, we discuss the need for a greater inclusion of women in leadership as a social responsibility rather than a business need, emphasise the need to move from documenting bias to providing solutions, and highlight the importance of focusing on men and their experiences as a part of a broader conceptualisation of gender equality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

Public discourse on current inequalities often invokes past injustice endured by minorities. This rhetoric also sometimes underlies contemporary equality policies. Drawing on social identity theory and the employment equity literature, we suggest that reminding people about past injustice against a disadvantaged group (e.g., women) can invoke social identity threat among advantaged group members (e.g., men) and undermine support for employment equity (EE) policies by fostering the belief that inequality no longer exists. We find support for our hypotheses in four studies examining Canadian (three studies) and American (one study) EE policies. Overall, we found that reminders of past injustice toward women undermined men’s support for an EE policy promoting women by heightening their denial of current gender discrimination. Supporting a social identity account, men’s responses were mediated by collective self-esteem, and were attenuated when threat was mitigated. Reminders of past injustice did not influence women’s support for the EE policy.

We advance our understanding of women’s continued underrepresentation in leadership positions by highlighting the subtle, but damaging, role benevolent sexism, a covert and socially accepted form of sexism, plays in this process. Drawing on and integrating previously disparate literatures on benevolent sexism and social support, we develop a new theoretical model in which benevolent sexism of both women and those in their social networks (i.e., managers and intimate partners) affect women’s acquisition of career social support for advancement at two levels, interpersonal and intrapersonal, and across multiple domains, work and family. At the interpersonal level, we suggest that managers’ and intimate partners’ benevolent sexism may undermine their provision of the needed career support to advance in leadership positions for women. At the intrapersonal level, we suggest that women’s personal endorsement of benevolent sexism may undermine their ability to recognize and willingness to seek out career support from their family members (i.e., intimate partners) and managers for advancement to leadership positions. Implications for theory and future research are discussed.