Positive Contact and Attitudes toward Women as Managers: The Moderating Role of Implicit Person Theory (or Mindset) about the Malleability of Human Attributes

Over the past decades, research has emphasized the "glass ceiling" that limits women's access to leadership roles and makes them the target of biased attitudes. This barrier persists because women continue to face challenges in breaking free from traditional gender-role stereotypes in the workplace. This study (N = 252), conducted in Italy using a cross-sectional approach, explored two key factors that might be associated with negative attitudes toward women managers: positive contact with women in leadership/managerial positions (i.e., counterstereotypic contact) and Implicit Person Theories (IPT) or mindsets (Dweck, 2024), which reflect individuals' beliefs system about the malleability of individual’s attributes. We expected the positive quality of contact to be associated with less negative towards women managers (hypothesis 1). As for the role of moderating role of IPT, two exploratory competitive hypotheses were advanced stressing that individuals low in IPT would benefit the most from the contact (hypothesis 2a) or, on the other hand, that individuals who are prejudice prone (i.e., have high IPT) would benefit the most from positive contact (hypothesis 2b). Besides providing support for hypothesis 1, and in line with hypothesis 2b, the findings revealed also that that IPT moderates the relationship between positive contact and negative attitudes towards women leaders. Specifically, when individuals held an entity IPT (believing an attribute is a fixed, non-malleable trait, i.e., fixed mindset), positive contact was associated with a reduction in negative attitudes toward women leaders. These findings highlight the power of positive contact in shifting rigid, stereotyped mindsets and, consequently, reducing prejudice towards women in leadership/managerial roles.