Team members' reactions to a gender-dissimilar leader: Competence monitoring and influence

Gender bias against female leaders suggests that female leaders are less acceptedthan male leaders. Moreover, research has suggested that male subordinates are lesswilling to accept female leaders than their female peers. We propose that theirunwillingness to accept a female leader's influence may invite male team members toseek to develop their own influence within the team. Drawing on the theory of socialself‐regulation in relational demography, we argue that compared with their femalecounterparts, male team members are more motivated to increase their influencewithin the team through competence monitoring (self‐regulated behavior toestablish their competence within the team), especially when there is a greaterproportion of male peers in the team (i.e., a lower level of gender dissimilaritybetween themselves and the rest of the team). In turn, we propose that competencemonitoring has an increasingly positive relationship with the influence of malemembers within the team. The findings of our multisource survey of 288 members of61 research and development teams supported our hypotheses. We discuss theimplications of our findings for research on gender and leadership and relationaldemography.