Team Gender Composition Correlates With Ratings of Women and Men Leaders: On the Role of Group Prototypicality

ABSTRACT Leadership research has emphasized the crucial role of gender and documented how women leaders are rated more negatively regarding essential behaviors and competencies. Drawing on social identity theory, studies show, however, that perceptions of women leaders are more positive if evaluated by female employees. This article contributes to this body of research, arguing that it is not necessarily the dyadic gender match between supervisor and employee that matters. Instead, gender‐based group identities deserve more attention, since teams, and the social peer interactions they facilitate, can shape how individual employees, independent of their own gender, experience women and men leaders. Based on Danish local government data from 3400+ employees, we find that employees working in teams whose composition is more female (more male) provide more favorable ratings of women (men) leaders, while controlling for dyadic gender matches. The findings point to the importance of team design, evaluation protocols, and training for debiasing leadership assessments.