Imagine you're working at a company and you'd like people to view you as a potential leader. How might you go about it? Perhaps you'd share your good ideas at meetings, hoping they'll notice your talent. Perhaps you'd pursue higher level training to improve your credentials. Maybe you'd point out ways your group's processes could improve. Would these strategies work? The answer may depend on your gender.
The trouble is that people's prototype of a "leader" is a man. As this journalist describes, when people are asked to draw a picture of a leader, they almost always draw a male figure (by the way, that's a frequency claim). How might people's default assumption--that leaders are male--affect their ability to spot leadership potential in their colleagues?
...getting noticed as a leader in the workplace is more difficult for women than for men. Even when a man and a woman were reading the same words off a script, only the man’s leadership potential was recognized.
Here is a study described in the piece. It's a factorial design (that is, it has two independent variables). As you read, decide what the two IVs are and what their levels are:
In one experiment, participants were asked to call into a monthly sales team meeting of a fictional insurance company, during which they would hear from either an Eric or an Erica. Later they were asked to rate the speaker on the degree to which he or she had “exhibited leadership,” “influenced the team” or “assumed a leadership role.”
The Erics who spoke up with change-oriented ideas were far more likely to be identified as leaders [rated higher on the leadership questions] than Erics who simply critiqued their team’s performance. But Ericas did not receive a boost in status from sharing ideas even though they were exactly the same as the Erics’.
a) What is the first IV? How many levels does it have and what are they? Is it manipulated or measured?
b) What is the second IV? How many levels does it have and what are they? Is it manipulated or measured?
c) What are the three DVs?
d) Sketch a well-labeled graph of the results of this study, using the DV of "exhibited leadership". Remember to put one of the IVs on the x-axis and the other IV as a line color or bar color.
Here's another Factorial design described in the journalist's article.
...in a second experiment, the researchers attempted to investigate the benefits of speaking up in the “wild.” The researchers asked participants in a 36-team skills competition at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to fill out a series of questionnaires before, during and after their competition.
The authors acknowledged that there were limitations in studying this atypically male-dominated place, but the nature of the competition allowed them to control for athletic ability, cognitive ability and other factors.
Still, after the competition, when participants ranked who they wanted to be the team leader, only the men who had spoken up with ideas received a boost.
“It didn’t matter whether women spoke up 1) almost never, 2) rarely, 3) sometimes, 4) often, or 5) almost always,” Kyle Emich, a professor at Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics at the University of Delaware, and one of the authors, wrote in an email. “Women did not gain status for speaking up, and subsequently were less likely (much less) to be considered leaders.”
e) One of the IVs in this study has FIVE levels--that's unusual, but it can happen! What is this IV and what are its five levels? Is this IV manipulated or measured?
f) What is the second IV? How many levels does it have and what are they? Is it manipulated or measured?
g) The DV is not explicitly stated in this summary. What do you think the DV was, based on this description?
h) Sketch a well-labeled graph of the results of this study, using the DV of "being nominated by peers as being the leader". I suggest that you put the 5-level IVs on the x-axis and the other IV as a line color or bar color.
i) The first example (With Eric and Erica) was a 2x2 factorial design. How would you state the design of this West Point example?
