OML 6300 Module 2 Module Paper: A Sales Manager's Path Through the Labyrinth Example

Not a Ceiling but a Maze: One Sales Manager's Path Through the Labyrinth of Leadership

Student Name

M.S. in Management in Organizational Leadership, Thomas Edison State University

OML-6300: Contemporary Issues in Leadership

Mentor Name

Month Day, Year

Not a Ceiling but a Maze: One Sales Manager's Path Through the Labyrinth of Leadership

Introduction

I am one of two women among the eleven regional sales managers at our company, and the only one with children. When I joined as a sales rep fourteen years ago, women made up nearly half of our reps. The proportion of women falls at every level above that, from district manager to vice president. This paper uses Eagly and Carli (2007), research on gender and leadership and my own career to ask why.

From Glass Ceiling to Labyrinth

Eagly and Carli (2007) argue that the glass ceiling, an invisible barrier at the top, no longer describes women's experience. Women do reach senior positions, but by a route with many turns, dead ends and detours, which they call a labyrinth. The obstacles are spread across a career: prejudice, resistance to women's leadership, issues of leadership style, family demands and underinvestment in social capital. The metaphor matters because it locates the problem throughout the pipeline, not only at the top, which is where my company's numbers suggest it lies.

Prejudice and Role Incongruity

Role congruity theory (Eagly & Karau, 2002) holds that because people associate leadership with agentic traits, such as assertiveness and ambition, and associate women with communal traits, such as warmth and helpfulness, women are seen as less suited to leadership roles, and women who display agentic behavior are evaluated less favorably. Heilman (2012) reviewed research showing that gender stereotypes produce both descriptive bias, assumptions about what women are like, and prescriptive bias, penalties when women violate expectations of how they should behave.

My performance reviews show both. Early in my career, a manager wrote that I "lacked the killer instinct for big accounts," a descriptive assumption, although my close rate on hospital contracts was the division's highest. Later, after I pushed back in a pricing meeting, a different manager wrote that I could be "abrasive with colleagues," a prescriptive penalty. A male colleague who argued harder in the same meeting was described as "passionate about his accounts."

The Double Bind and Leadership Style

Eagly and Carli describe a double bind: women leaders are criticized for being too communal, and so not strong enough, or too agentic, and so not likable. The feedback above placed me in exactly that bind, too soft for big accounts and too hard in meetings. Eagly et al. (2003) found in a meta-analysis that women leaders were somewhat more transformational than men and more likely to use contingent reward, the effective side of transactional leadership, while men were more likely to use management by exception and laissez-faire leadership, styles associated with lower effectiveness. The differences were small, but they suggest that the style many women adopt to escape the double bind, combining warmth and competence, is an effective one.

That has been my experience. I learned to lead my team by setting clear goals, recognizing results publicly and coaching individually, a style my reps rate highly in our upward survey. But I had to learn to present assertive positions in meetings as questions or as the team's view, which costs time and sometimes clarity.

Family Demands

Eagly and Carli note that women still carry more of the domestic and child care work in most families and that long hours and travel expectations penalize those with caregiving responsibilities. When my second child was born, I declined a promotion to a national accounts role that required travel three weeks a month. A male peer with young children accepted it. Our company did not ask whether the travel was necessary; it treated the requirement as fixed and my decision as a lack of ambition. I do not regret the decision, but the way it was recorded did lasting harm: two years later, when I applied for a regional role, a member of the selection panel asked whether I was still committed to advancement.

Social Capital

Eagly and Carli emphasize that leadership depends on networks, and that women often have less time for informal networking and less access to influential informal networks. At my company, those networks formed on golf outings and at late dinners after regional meetings. I rarely went, partly because of family and partly because I did not play golf and felt unwelcome at the dinners. Ibarra et al. (2013) argue that women's advancement is slowed by subtle, second-generation bias, such as networks and role models that favor men, which is rarely deliberate but shapes who is seen as a leader.

The Glass Cliff

When I was finally promoted to regional manager, the region I was given had missed targets for three years and had the highest turnover in the company. Ryan and Haslam (2005) found that women were more likely than men to be appointed to leadership positions in firms that had performed poorly, positions with a higher risk of failure, which they called the glass cliff. I cannot know whether my appointment reflected that pattern; the region needed help and I wanted the job. But two male peers promoted in the same year received stable regions, and one told me directly that no one else had wanted mine.

The region recovered under my leadership, which I am proud of. The point is not that the assignment was unfair, but that the risk was unequal: had the region failed, the failure would have been mine.

What Has Helped

Several things helped me through the labyrinth, and they suggest what the company could do deliberately. A senior woman in our marketing department mentored me informally for six years, and her advice on presenting assertive positions shaped the style I described above. A regional director, a man, sponsored my promotion by speaking for me in a meeting I did not attend; Ibarra and colleagues distinguish such sponsorship, using one's influence on someone's behalf, from mentoring, and argue that women are often mentored but less often sponsored. And a flexible schedule after my second child, negotiated individually rather than offered by policy, let me stay in sales rather than leave. Each of these depended on individual goodwill. The recommendations below aim to make them part of the system.

Recommendations for the Company

A sponsorship program would extend to others what happened to me by chance.

Conclusion

My career has been a labyrinth, not a ceiling. No single barrier stopped me; many small turns slowed me. Eagly and Carli's account, supported by research on role congruity, prescriptive bias, leadership style and the glass cliff, explains why the proportion of women falls at each level of my company. The recommendations address the turns that the company controls, and the most important may be the simplest: comparing, in calibration sessions, how we describe the same behavior in women and in men. I also take a lesson for my own leadership. As a manager, I now write reviews myself, and I have begun to check my own language for the same descriptive and prescriptive bias I received.

References

Eagly, A. H., & Carli, L. L. (2007). Through the labyrinth: The truth about how women become leaders. Harvard Business School Press.

Eagly, A. H., & Karau, S. J. (2002). Role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders. Psychological Review, 109(3), 573-598. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.109.3.573

Eagly, A. H., Johannesen-Schmidt, M. C., & van Engen, M. L. (2003). Transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire leadership styles: A meta-analysis comparing women and men. Psychological Bulletin, 129(4), 569-591. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.129.4.569

Heilman, M. E. (2012). Gender stereotypes and workplace bias. Research in Organizational Behavior, 32, 113-135. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.riob.2012.11.003

Ibarra, H., Ely, R. J., & Kolb, D. M. (2013). Women rising: The unseen barriers. Harvard Business Review, 91(9), 60-66.

Ryan, M. K., & Haslam, S. A. (2005). The glass cliff: Evidence that women are over-represented in precarious leadership positions. British Journal of Management, 16(2), 81-90. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8551.2005.00433.x