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ABSTRACT
This article examines public employees’ perceptions of agency heads’ leadership styles by focusing on the role of gender in organizational management. Employing a survey experiment with over 800 national civil servants in Korea, we find that female employees have more positive perceptions of transformational leadership than male employees; however, female and male employees’ perceptions of transactional leadership are not significantly different. Moreover, employee gender, when investigated along with gender representation in organizations, produces more nuanced results. Our findings suggest a clear gender gap in perceptions of leadership styles among public employees, which is further unpacked with variations in gender representation.
Acknowledgement
The authors thank Soo-Young Lee, Sounman Hong, and three anonymous reviewers for valuable comments. The authors are grateful for excellent research assistance from Minho Song and Jungmin Son. All errors are ours.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Data availability statement
The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at DOI:10.17605/OSF.IO/TPA6U.
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2020.1730941
Notes
1. We recognize a multidimensional aspect in conceptualizing leadership styles (Jensen et al. Citation2019) but maintain that the described features used here to conceptualize the two leadership styles are their core elements that are clearly distinct and can be applied to estimate changes in subordinate perceptions of these leadership styles empirically.
2. As the precursor of a truly follower-centred approach to leadership, the romance of leadership perspective (Meindl Citation1995) helps to produce empirical evidence that reveals ‘important insights into how followers conceptualize leader behaviors and their potential impacts’ (Bligh Citation2011, 428; Bligh et al. Citation2007). Uhl-Bien and Pillai (Citation2007) suggest that followers can actively form their roles as partners or participants. In public administration research, there have been gradual shifts towards the influence of socially constructed views of followership in the leadership process. The quality of the relationships between public employees and their supervisors is one central factor discussed in the literature (Hassan and Hatmaker Citation2015; Vigoda-Gadot and Beeri Citation2012).
3. http://www.mpm.go.kr/mpm/lawStat/infoStatistics/hrStatistics/hrStatistics03/(accessed 20 November 2019).
4. As women’s representation is improved, such a gender gap exists even in top executive officers’ perceptions of employees. Anecdotal evidence suggests that, while a female vice minister views more balanced gender representation as ‘the availability of more qualified female employees’, a male vice minister admits that with a growing number of female employees, it is ‘not easy and sometimes cumbersome to direct female subordinates.’ Interviews with Lee Bok-sil and Kwon Yong-hyun, Vice Ministers of Gender Equality and Family, South Korea, April 2016.
5. Although these characteristics do not precisely represent transactional leadership, they are more closely related with transactional than transformational leadership styles.
6. See also recent work discussing methodological issues and possible solutions with list experiments, such as measurement error (Blair, Chou, and Imai Citation2019).
7. In the Online Appendix, we provide detailed guidance regarding the logic of list experiments.
8. The conceptualization of these leadership styles can be composed of more than one element, but focusing on the key element of each leadership behaviour, which clearly distinguishes one type from the other, will help respondents to easily connect the element to their leaders’ attributes.
9. The Public Performance and Management Survey includes 29 sets of questions concerning organizational performance and management, public sector leadership, organizational culture and commitment, as well as 10 questions about respondents’ demographic and civil service characteristics.
10. The human research subjects aspect of our experimental protocol was approved by our university’s Institutional Review Board.
11. Agencies excluded are those not accessible, such as intelligence agencies, defence and security ministries, or those that were too small to draw enough samples to be meaningfully representative of Korean agencies. See Online Appendix Table A1 for a list of participating agencies.
12. Respondents who agreed to participate in the surveys received an email with a link that led them to the questionnaire.
13. Since higher ranking civil servants are expected to have more direct interaction with agency heads and thus more precise perceptions of agency heads’ leadership styles than lower ranking employees, they are slightly oversampled in our survey.
14. In the control group, over 50 per cent of the respondents answer affirmatively to all three control items. Given these results, ceiling effects can be a particular concern to our analysis. We test for this possibility by conducting a statistical test proposed by Blair and Imai (Citation2012). At α = .05 as the significance level of the test, we find the minimum p value to be bigger than .10. Since these p values are above the α threshold, we cannot reject the null hypothesis of no ceiling effect.
15. For computation, a nonlinear regression model is first fitted to the control group, and then the other nonlinear regression model is fitted to the treatment group using the adjusted response variable (Blair and Imai Citation2012, 53).
16. Information about the proportion of female employees across civil service ranks within each organization is, unfortunately, not available due to data limitation, as the Korean government has not made such information publicly available yet.
17. This model is compatible with cross-level interactions as evidenced by past experimental research (see Blair and Imai Citation2012, 58–60). See also https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/list/list.pdf (accessed 20 November 2019).
18. http://www.mpm.go.kr/mpm/lawStat/infoStatistics/hrStatistics/hrStatistics03/(accessed 20 November 2019).
19. https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20180628083300001 (accessed 20 November 2019).
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Don S. Lee
Don S. Lee is Leverhulme Trust fellow and assistant professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. His research focuses on the role of gender in public management and the gendered patterns of executive appointments, promotions, and dismissals.
Soonae Park
Soonae Park is professor in the Graduate School of Public Administration at Seoul National University, where she is also director of Public Performance Management Research Center. Her research focuses on performance management and environmental policy.