Suchergebnisse

"Descriptive research from the '70's suggests that management has traditionally been a sex-typed masculine profession; that men collaborated to develop a management science based on the tenets of masculinity; and that by understanding men's experience in military organizations and team sports, much of the mystique of masculine management may be understood.1 Empirical research from this same time period documents that effective managerial performance is associated with attributes of masculinity in the eyes of both women and men.2 The research focus on sex roles and managerial rotes is, of course, a response to the entry of large numbers of women into management positions during the '70's. In the 80's, the popular management literature urges us to consider the flexibility of the "androgynous" manager, one who is neither sex-typed masculine nor sex-typed feminine.3 The androgynous manager is not limited by the traditional constraints of masculinity of femininity in his or her expectations of self or others. Rather, androgynous managers exhibit a high degree of both masculine and feminine characteristics. As such, they have a wider range of behaviors with which they may respond to the contingencies of the leadership/management situation, including the gendered behavior of the people they supervise. Two important questions arise Out of a review of the above knowledge. How do our students describe the good manager in terms of masculine and feminine personality characteristics? How does each view himself or herself in terms of these characteristics? To answer these questions, organizational behavior professors have often used the Bem Sex-Rote Inventory (BSRI) to measure students' descriptions of the good manager and/or their perceptions of themselves as feminine and masculine.4 The BSRI instrument asks individuals to describe their behavior on a seven-point scale for each of 60 phrases. Twenty are feminine characteristics, twenty are masculine characteristics and twenty are neutral., socially desirable characteristics. Scoring of the instruments yields one of four possible outcomes: an individual may be categorized as feminine, masculine, androgynous (high values for both masculine and feminine characteristics) or undifferentiated (low values for both masculine and feminine characteristics). The median scores for classifying individual scores may be based on group scores or on median scores from Bern's research. The BSRI has been a useful research tool, but as a teaching or training tool, some adverse effects have been noted, for example, by Davis, Powell and Randolph.6 They point out that males who score feminine feel, threatened about their self-concept and sexuality. Our use of the BSRI in teaching and training situations has produced many additional undesirable responses. Some women have felt their femininity threatened by masculine scores, many who scored androgynous have expressed concern that their scores reflect deviance, and those who have scored undifferentiated have joked that they are nerds, nebbishes, asexual, not yet formed into anything, don't have personalities, and the like. Further, when students or workshop participants are told that median scores differ for different populations tested, the instrument and, perhaps even what it purports to measure, seems arbitrary, and artificial. Justifying and explaining this to the black-andwhiters of the world is a tedious task. This experiential exercise is designed to take the sting and stigma Out of the BSRI scores and labels, and to use its masculine and feminine constructs to guide personal exploration of each individual's gendered aspect of his or her self concept. Participants have the opportunity to reflect on their beliefs about themselves and about what a good manager is like in terms of masculine and feminine dimensions. The exercise is effective for introducing issues of managing a mixed sex work team and for examining leadership style in various situations. It is especially relevant for use in classes such as Women and Men in Organizations or Women in Management in colleges of business administration, or classes in other departments in which gender roles and organizational roles are studied. These include: sociology, anthropology, psychology, communication, human development, education and social work. "