View article

We investigate the role of gender in linking communicative acts that occur in the interactions of self-managed teams to emergent leadership. Specifically, this study presents a framework that differentiates between agentic and communal task- and relations-oriented communication as predictors of emergent leadership, and it hypothesizes that men and women do not differ in what they say but do differ in how they are rewarded (i.e. ascribed informal leadership responsibilities) for their statements.

Interaction coding was used to capture the meeting communication of 116 members of 41 self-managed teams.

Men and women exhibited the same amount of agentic and communal task- and relations-oriented communication and were equally likely to emerge as leaders. However, men experienced an emergent leadership advantage when engaging in agentic and …