Suchergebnisse

Purpose
As organizations aim to become increasingly diverse, it is important to understand how perspectives of potential future leaders vary across culture and gender. This study aims to advance the understanding of the persistent gender gap in management.


Design/methodology/approach
Samples from the gender-segregated Qatar and the co-ed Denmark present a unique opportunity to investigate the potential effects of gender. Here, 115 Middle Easterners and 121 Scandinavians rated perceived importance of job-related skills, networking upward and serendipity in leadership acquisition.


Findings
Effects of gender showed that compared to men, women across cultures expected that serendipity has less to do with leadership acquisition. Middle Eastern women also showed low expectations regarding networking with people in powerful positions. Nevertheless, both genders showed conviction of meritocracy by rating job-related skills as the most important factor in leadership acquisition. Cross-culturally, Scandinavians presumed job-related skills to be more important than Middle Easterners.


Research limitations/implications
Despite meritocracy beliefs, it appears that gender differences in perceived possibility of leadership acquisition contribute to the gender gap in management. Scandinavian women relied more on networking than Middle Eastern women, but still lacked faith in serendipitous opportunities compared to male peers. Perceived luck enhances achievement motivation. If men rely more on luck than women, then they are more confident in succeeding and more ambitious about pursuit of leadership. Women's lack of faith in serendipity might affect their career ambitions negatively even in societies emphasizing equality.


Originality/value
This is the first study that directly focuses on gender differences in perception of opportunities for leadership acquisition through serendipity.

Employee silence, the withholding of work‐related ideas, questions, or concerns from someone who could effect change, has been proposed to hamper individual and collective learning as well as the detection of errors and unethical behaviors in many areas of the world. To facilitate cross‐cultural research, we validated an instrument measuring four employee silence motives (i.e., silence based on fear, resignation, prosocial, and selfish motives) in 21 languages. Across 33 countries (N = 8,222) representing diverse cultural clusters, the instrument shows good psychometric properties (i.e., internal reliabilities, factor structure, and measurement invariance). Results further revealed similarities and differences in the prevalence of silence motives between countries, but did not necessarily support cultural stereotypes. To explore the role of culture for silence, we examined relationships of silence motives with the societal practices cultural dimensions from the GLOBE Program. We found relationships between silence motives and power distance, institutional collectivism, and uncertainty avoidance. Overall, the findings suggest that relationships between silence and cultural dimensions are more complex than commonly assumed. We discuss the explanatory power of nations as (cultural) units of analysis, our social scientific approach, the predictive value of cultural dimensions, and opportunities to extend silence research geographically, methodologically, and conceptually.