Age- and Gender-Related Barriers to Career Advancement and Leader Emergence

Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

This symposium brings together 5 presentations offering different perspectives on how age and gender-related characteristics influence leadership and career advancement. This symposium aims to bring novel and more nuanced insights into multiple and overlooked perceptual and structural factors impeding younger generations’ and women’s access to leadership roles, which offer new pathways to address and remove these barriers. If you don’t look your age: Age-Incongruent Appearance and Leadership Author: Isaaca Jane Wang; The Chinese University of Hong Kong Author: Julian Pfrombeck; The Chinese University of Hong Kong Less Noise, More Poise: The Causes and Consequences of Perceiving Maturity in Others Author: Kristina Wald; The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania Author: Maurice Schweitzer; University of Pennsylvania Exploring the Association of Supervisors’ Age, Gender and Subordinates' Leadership Perception Author: Tsz Nam Toby Tsang; The Chinese University of Hong Kong Unequal Rewards for Climbing the Career Ladder? Understanding Pay Disadvantages for Female Migrants Author: Sophie Johanna Moser; University of Konstanz Organizational Enablers and Barriers to Mothers’ Career Progression into Leadership Author: America Harris; Author: Ulrike Fasbender; University of Hohenheim

Brokered Distances: Trust in Brokers within and Between Organizations

Organizational Psychology Review · 2025-04-13 · 12 citations

Organizational brokers, such as producers, diplomats, and middle managers, connect people within and across organizations. Trust in brokers promotes their effectiveness in connecting unfamiliar counterparts and transferring information between disconnected parties. Often, however, the very conditions that create the need for brokering, such as the existence of structural holes, undermine trust in brokers. We introduce an organizing framework to explain how fundamental features of brokering processes shape the perceived trustworthiness of brokers. Specifically, we describe how individuals make inferences about brokers’ ability, benevolence, and integrity based on the horizontal and vertical distances they bridge, the extent to which their brokering involves in-role versus extra-role behavior, and the extent to which they facilitate indirect versus direct exchanges between counterparts. Our model links situational features of brokering processes with established antecedents of interpersonal trust, thereby identifying challenges and opportunities for brokers and organizations.

Motivated Advice Seeking: Are Advice Seekers Trying to Be More Accurate?

SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

Negotiation

2025-05-01

Many of our most consequential outcomes derive from negotiations—from the price we pay for homes and cars, to the salaries we earn, to quotidian outcomes such as which household chores we perform, where we go on vacation, and what vegetables our children eat.

Emotional Intelligence as the Heart of the Workplace: Navigating Social Cues and People Perceptions

Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

This symposium aims to explore how different pillars of emotional intelligence – including awareness, motivation, emotion displays and adaptive behaviors based on emotions – can elevate or diminish relevant organizational outcomes. We emphasize the importance of understanding and managing one’s own and others’ emotions in using social prompts to enhance personal and social effectiveness. Four presentations look at how emotional intelligence shapes organizational outcomes, including leaders responding to followers’ negative emotions, employees deciding to stay or leave, and subtle cues affecting people perceptions. Using diverse methods and perspectives, these studies collectively provide a valuable perspective on how organizations can foster an emotionally intelligent culture to adapt and thrive in the face of future challenges. Managers Give Additional Work to Employees Who Like Them More (vs. Less) Author: Sangah Bae; Cornell U. Author: Vanessa Bohns; Cornell U. When does a “Hard Task” Become a “Normal Part of a Hard Job?” Data from Emotionally Difficult Tasks Author: Polly Kang; INSEAD Author: Maurice Schweitzer; U. of Pennsylvania Empathy on Display: Enacting Cognitive and Affective Empathy in Leader-Follower Interactions Author: Valentina Sara Schneider; London Business School Navigating Minds: Perceiving Self-Awareness in Others Author: Kristina Wald; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania Author: Shereen J. Chaudhry; U. of Chicago Booth School of business

People Avoid Asking Gossips for Advice

Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

We identify a key factor that influences whether or not and whom people ask for advice: a potential advisor’s reputation for gossip. Across 5 studies, we demonstrate that an individual’s reputation for gossip reduces others’ willingness to ask them for advice, even when the potential advisor is highly competent and easily accessible. We show that people are concerned that gossips will judgmentally tell others about their advice seeking. We also show that, in addition to avoiding advisors who gossip, people seek out advisors with reputations for discretion. Our results advance our understanding of the advice seeking process by considering advice within a broad social context. Our findings also highlight an important cost of gossip for both individuals and their organizations.

Organizational Humor: A Foundation for Future Scholarship, a Review, and a Call to Action

Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior · 2024-08-08 · 10 citations

Humor is a fundamental managerial tool that can help managers communicate, build trust, and promote cooperation. Humor, however, is complex, and humor scholarship has identified both benefits and risks of using humor for leaders, employees, and organizations. Although humor is both pervasive and impactful in organizations, humor scholarship is vastly under-represented relative to its managerial relevance and impact in leading management journals. In this review, we build on scholarship in the psychology, communication, and management literatures to define humor, introduce a framework and nomenclature for studying humor, and distinguish organizational humor from social humor. We identify open questions worthy of scholarly attention and barriers that have likely limited the publication of humor scholarship in management journals. We conclude with a call to action to guide future research in organizational humor.

Gossip, power, and advice: Gossipers are conferred less expert power

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · 2024-06-26 · 6 citations

Benevolent friends and high integrity leaders: How preferences for benevolence and integrity change across relationships

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · 2023-06-30 · 11 citations