The “glass ceiling” metaphor represents the frustration experienced by women in the 1980s and 1990s who entered the workforce in large numbers following equal opportunity legislation that gave them greater access to education and employment. After initial success in attaining lower management positions, the women found their career progress slowing as they reached higher levels of their organizations. A formal definition of the glass ceiling specifies that a female disadvantage in promotion should accelerate at the highest levels of the organization, and researchers adopting this formal definition have found mixed evidence for glass ceilings across organizations and across countries. Researchers who have expanded the glass ceiling definition to encompass racial minorities have similarly found mixed results. However, these mixed results do not detract from the metaphor’s value in highlighting the stereotype-based practices that embed discrimination deep within organizational structures and understanding why women continue to be underrepresented in senior organizational roles around the world. In particular, researchers investigating the glass ceiling have identified a variety of obstacles (including glass cliffs, glass walls, and glass doors) that create a more complete understanding of the barriers that women experience in their careers. As organizations offer shorter job ladders and less job security, the career patterns of both women and men are exhibiting more downward, lateral, and static movement. In this career context, the glass ceiling may no longer be the ideal metaphor to represent the obstacles that women are most likely to encounter.
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The Glass Ceiling in Organizations
Carol T. Kulik and Belinda Rae
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Followership
Mary Uhl-Bien, Melissa Carsten, and Toby Newstead
Followership is a subtopic of leadership studies that represents the role of followers and following in the co-creation of the leadership/followership relation and outcomes. The focus on followership emerged with the shift in leadership research toward relational perspectives aimed at counteracting the predominant “leader-centric” bias that views leadership as initiated, directed, and largely controlled by leaders. Leader-centric approaches attribute outcomes to the differential influence and superior capabilities of leaders, with little to no recognition of the contribution of followers. They treat followers as passive participants who submit to the direction and goals of leaders. To counter this, followership perspectives view followers as active and essential participants in the co-creation of leadership/followership.
Followership approaches argue that there is no leadership without followership: It is in the willingness of someone to follow or defer to another that leadership and followership are co-created. Followership is always present when leadership is occurring, and overlooking or disregarding it does not reduce or diminish its importance. Followership scholars draw attention to the necessary presence of followership by repositioning leadership and followership into a joint construct in which leadership and followership are two sides of the same coin. In this relation, leadership is the study of the agency, behaviors, identity, and characteristics of leaders in the co-creation process, and followership is the study of the agency, behaviors, identity, and characteristics of followers in the co-creation.
Followership is formally defined as followers’ agency, position, identity, characteristics, and behavioral choices in the co-creation of leadership/followership. It can occur in formal relations, such as those seen in hierarchical organizations (i.e., manager–subordinate relations), or it can be seen in informal relations, where individuals choose who will lead and who will follow. Topics addressed in followership research include things such as the nature or style of those who are more or less effective at following or being a follower; what it is like to be in a state or condition of followership; and the characteristics, experiences, or factors associated with holding a followership position. In all cases, followership is fluid and affected by myriad factors such that having the role of follower does not mean that the individual only follows. In many cases, the best followership occurs when followers work in coordination with leaders to support the leader’s role and help attain the leader’s goals.
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Leader–Member Exchange: A Commentary on Long-Term Staying Power and Future Research Directions
Terri A. Scandura and Kim Gower
In 1975, the phrase “vertical dyad linkage” (VDL) was introduced to begin examining the quality of the roles between the leaders and direct reports, and it was soon discovered that the linkages ranged between high quality and low quality. That linkage progressed into “leader–member exchange” (LMX) in 1982. In essence, research reached a point where it found a continuum of the quality of the relationship between the two members. High-quality relationships put the employees into the leader’s “ingroup,” while low-quality relationships left employees on the outside looking in. It followed that those in the ingroup would have some say in the decision-making, would have easier access to the leader, and would garner more respect and “liking.”
Researchers have used the LMX-7 to examine how the quality of superior/subordinate relationships affects individual, interpersonal, and organization factors like job satisfaction, communication motives, and organizational identification (as did the original LMX scale). Although the LMX-7 remains one of the most prominent psychometric measures of LMX, researchers still debate whether the construct should be considered unidimensional or multidimensional.
While the intricacies of LMX-7 versus LMX have been argued, and with teams becoming more of an organizational resource, team–member exchange (TMX) was found to be a supported extension of LMX. While at this point TMX is lacking in the volume and pace of research, due to the difficulties of measurement among a group of people who might have a variety of leaders during the process, the existing research has produced some results that are extremely relevant, now and in the future. Examples of what has been found when the team exchange relationship is high include reduced stress, increased psychological empowerment, increased creativity, increased team performance, increased individual performance, increased organizational citizenship behaviors, increased organizational commitment, and increased job satisfaction, just to name a few.
In sum, the investigation into LMX provides a history of the field of LMX and its many iterations and the role it plays in leadership studies. This research includes LMX antecedents, consequences, moderators, mediators, and outcomes, as any field in which over 4,500 papers have been published needs an effective way to highlight the progress and pathways.
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The Arts and the Art and Science of Management Teaching
Joan V. Gallos
The arts have played a major role in the development of management theory, practice, and education; and artists’ competencies like creativity, inventiveness, aesthetic appreciation, and a design mindset are increasingly vital for individual and organizational success in a competitive global world. The arts have long been used in teaching to: (a) explore human nature and social structures; (b) facilitate cognitive, socioemotional, and behavioral growth; (c) translate theory into action; (d) provide opportunities for professional development; and (e) enhance individual and systemic creativity and capacities for change. Use of literature and films are curricular mainstays. A review of the history of the arts in management teaching and learning illustrates how the arts have expanded our ways of knowing and defining managerial and leadership effectiveness—and the competencies and training necessary for them.
The scholarship of management teaching is large, primarily ‘how-to’ teaching designs and the assessments of them. There is a clear need to expand the research on how and why the arts are and can be used more effectively to educate professionals, enable business growth and new product development, facilitate collaboration and team building, and bring innovative solutions to complex ideas. Research priorities include: the systematic assessments of the state of arts-based management teaching and learning; explorations of stakeholder attitudes and of environmental forces contributing to current educational models and practices; analyses of the learning impact of various pedagogical methods and designs; examining the unique role of the arts in professional education and, especially, in teaching for effective action; mining critical research from education, psychology, creativity studies, and other relevant disciplines to strengthen management teaching and learning; and probing how to teach complex skills like innovative thinking and creativity. Research on new roles and uses for the arts provide a foundation for a creative revisiting of 21st-century management education and training.
