discovered the future potential of women’s leadership styles and even as claiming
that men need to learn ‘women’s games’.
In a recent UK study, this traditionally perceived leadership style of women
was highly valued by CEOs (Catalyst and Opportunity Now 2001). In particu-
lar, they praised their interpersonal, communication and people-management
skills. However, many senior women interviewed said that they felt they had
to adjust their style to one with which men were comfortable.
The link between management style and more ‘masculine’ personality
traits and behaviours has been the subject of an extensive body of literature.
One of the first studies of the sex role stereotyping and requisites of successful
top managers was conducted by Schein (1973, 1975). Schein built on previous
work into sex role stereotypes (Anastasi and Foley, 1949; Maccoby, 1966;
Rosenkrantz et al., 1968), which suggested that there were distinct characteris-
tics, attitudes and temperaments that could be attributed to men and others
that could be attributed to women. She argued that sex role stereotypes could
create a barrier to advancement where an occupation is ‘sex-typed’, i.e. a large
majority of individuals in it are of one sex and there is an associated normative
expectation that this is how it should be. Writing in the early 1970s, Schein
viewed management as a sex-typed occupation due to the high ratio of men in
managerial positions. This being the case, she hypothesised that the managerial
position would seem to require personal attributes thought to be more charac-
teristic of men than women (Schein, 1973: 95).
In order to test this hypothesis, Schein developed a Descriptive Index
(SDI), with items that differentially described males and females. Schein then
took the SDI to a sample of 300 male middle line managers of various depart-
ments within nine insurance companies located in the United States (Schein,
1973). The sample was split randomly into three equal groups which were each
presented with a different form of the SDI containing the same descriptive
terms and instructions, but one form asked for a description of women in
general, one for a description of men in general and one for a description of
successful middle managers. In a second study (Schein, 1975), a sample com-
posed of 167 female managers in the insurance sector who matched as closely
as possible the male sample from the previous study, were asked to complete
the same task. The findings from both studies found that both males and
females perceived a strong correlation between the items rated as resembling
men and those resembling managers and a near zero correlation with women
and managers. Further research replicating Schein’s experiment has tended to
produce the same results from men, although women no longer sex-type the
managerial job (e.g. Brenner et al., 1989; Heilman et al., 1989; Schein et al., 1989;
Schein and Mueller, 1992; Schein and Davidson, 1993; Schein, 1994; Schein et al.,
1996). Heilman et al. (1989) expanded Schein’s original research by asking 268
male managers to rate one of seven target groups: men (in general, managers,
or successful managers), women (in general, managers, or successful managers),
or successful middle managers. The results from this study were similar to
Women’s Role in International Management 363