| Leaders with more self-accurate ratings have been found to be more effective and more successful than those leaders with self-evaluations that are not aligned with others (Atwater & Yammarino, 1992; Bass & Yammarino, 1991). Several reports from the 1980's suggest that women underrate their own performance as leaders and managers (Parsons, Meece, Adler, & Kaczala, 1982; LaNoue & Curtis, 1985, Meehan & Overton, 1986 as cited in Van Velsor, Taylor, & Leslie, 1993; Beyer, 1990) despite the lack of specific data to substantiate these inferences. The conclusion that others likely draw from these repeated messages is that female leaders have poor self-awareness, and therefore are less effective. Strong inferential statements, such as those present in the literature today, may be contributing to ongoing negative stereotypical assumptions about female leaders' potential, and thus, may be contributing to the lack of female leaders advancing to executive business ranks, i.e., the 'glass ceiling'. Only one study that reported data from nearly two decades ago has refuted the suggestion that women underrate their leadership competencies (Van Velsor, Taylor & Leslie, 1993). This study examined contemporary data to test whether female leaders working in today's business environment under-rated their own performance as leaders. Ex Post Facto research using data from an existing, large database was used to investigate the relationships of female leaders' self-assessment and the assessments of other raters (including direct reports, peers, managers and others). The database was analyzed to test whether female leaders under-rated, over-rated, or were in-agreement with how others rated their leadership skills and behaviors using the High Impact Leadership Model(TM) (Linkage, 2003). |
