Sheryl Skaggs

Increasingly, human resource managers are recognizing the need to understand how the differences between men and women affect organizational culture and leadership. This study of 314 workers examines the influence of gender on the leadership and cultural dimensions identified in the acclaimed Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) research program. The results show that gender is a significant predictor in two of the nine cultural dimensions—gender egalitarianism and assertiveness—and two of the six leadership dimensions—participative leadership and self‐protective leadership. These findings can help HR managers capitalize on the strengths of both male and female employees as they design policies and practices to achieve organizational objectives.

Prior work on equal employment opportunity tends to focus on a limited set of factors that influence change in organizational structures and policies. This article considers a broader set of potentially influential legal and political coercive pressures—namely, discrimination lawsuits, federal court dynamics, and state political ideology—and analyzes their implications for concrete changes in organizational behavior. Using national establishment-level data on the supermarket industry from 1983 to 1998, I estimate African American managerial representation using a series of auto-distributed lag (ADL) models with fixed-effects. The results show that in the year following a lawsuit filing against a particular supermarket establishment, African Americans are more likely to enter management. Furthermore, over the long run, coercive isomorphism (whereby establishments subject to a lawsuit come to adopt industry averages for African American managerial representation) seems to prevail. Finally, legal pressures associated with federal court judges' gender and racial/ethnic diversity and state-level government ideology are also influential. I conclude by discussing these results and the importance of systematically incorporating political process into sociological theorizing and analyses of workplace diversity.