Thesis Award
Master's thesis of Meltem Düzgün entitled "Gender-Congruent Leadership Style and Prejudiced Personality in Relation with Job/Leader Satisfaction and Trust" supervised by Dr. Yonca Toker Gültaş, won the 2018-2019 Social Sciences Annual Thesis Award. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12624064/index.pdf
Click for the thesis abstract
Prejudice toward leaders might be problematic for employees and organizations because of its negative consequences for employees like lower job satisfaction or leader satisfaction. One of the reasons which can cause prejudiced attitudes toward leaders is the mismatch between gender roles and the leadership style displayed, as according to role incongruity theory, employees expect their leaders to show behaviors consistent with their gender roles in society (Eagly & Karau, 2002). According to Altemeyer (1998), there are two personality types which have strong correlations with prejudice; Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO). Altemeyer stated that these two personality traits are the reason for many kinds of prejudice including prejudice toward women. For that reason, it was expected that those personalities would interact with gender congruent and incongruent leadership styles in predicting job-, organization-, and leader-related outcomes of employees. Data were collected from 332 employees and moderated regression analyses were performed. Results of the current study showed that, on the one hand, follower RWA and SDO did interact with the leadership style of male leaders in a way that more prejudiced personalities had more positive outcomes when their leader displayed a role congruent leadership style. On the other hand, having a gender role congruent women leader had positive effects on the levels of follower job satisfaction, organizational commitment, leader satisfaction and trust in the leader, while having a gender role incongruent women leader had negative effects on those outcomes, regardless of the employees’ RWA and SDO levels.