The Factors Affecting the Womens Role as a Leader in the Workplaces - Research Proposal Example

To Investigate the Factors Affecting the Women’s role as a Leader in the Workplaces Table of Contents PROBLEM MENT 2 Research Question 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 3 AIMS AND OBJECTIVES 7 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 8 Population and Sample 9 RESEARCH DESIGN 11 Instrumentation and Data Collection 12 Dependent and Independent Variables 12 Planned Method of Analysis 13 Limitations and Assumptions 13 14 TIME SCHEDULE 15 RESOURCES NEEDED 16 16 PERSONNEL 16 BUDGET 16 NEEDED ASSURANCES/CLEARANCES 17 BIBLIOGRAPHY 17 PROBLEM STATEMENT The women’s role at workplaces is increasing because various studies have found that women are as competent, educated and experience as men. However, a great disparity still exists between the number of women and men leaders in the corporate world. Women tend to show more compassionate and leadership style as compared to male who tend to be more aggressive and competitive. However, men disproportionately outnumber women in the leadership roles. Therefore, it is important to analyze the factors which affect the women’s role at workplaces either positively or negatively so that discriminatory practices at workplaces could be reduced. The aim of this research study is to determine the various challenges faced by women as they climb the corporate ladder. Research Question In order to investigate the mentioned problem, the following research question has been proposed. What are the factors which may impact the women’s role as leaders in the workplaces? What have been the challenges, antecedents and results of effective women leadership? LITERATURE REVIEW Leadership is the process through which an individual influences the actions of others to achieve the defined goals and directs the personnel, to make organization more coherent and cohesive (L Models ). There was a time when most of the top management positions were given to the male employees because of the supposedly high influence of male. However, the women’s role as leaders in the workplaces is significantly increasing. Increasing number of women is taking the leadership roles that were previously occupied by men therefore, different leadership style of men and women are attracting the attention of researchers (Eagly & Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001). A considerable literature work has been done to study the difference between male and female leadership styles. Most of the research studies support that men usually have more authoritative and assertive leadership style as compared to women. Eagly has analyzed that men and women show nine leadership behaviors with different frequencies. Women apply more people development, expectations and rewards and role model whereas, men apply more individualistic decision making and control and corrective actions. Moreover, men and women equally apply intellectual stimulation and efficient communication whereas; women are slightly more than man in inspiration and participative decision making (Desvaux & Devillard, 2008). Khankhoje et al highlighted the importance of women leadership role from scientific perspective. In 48 countries, women have occupied highest political offices for example, Prime Minister, President and almost 60 percent increase has been seen in the last decade and a half (Khankhoje, Kb, & Kumar). Moreover, they also stated that male brains is 10% larger than female brains however, women have more nerve cells and a larger corpus collusum therefore, women are faster in transferring data and they outperform men in interpersonal and communication skills. Therefore, one of the reasons because of the increasing role of women as leaders in the recent years could be because of the awareness of women to their inherent capabilities. Lanier argued that women role is still overrepresented in many professions and underrepresented in others. His arguments were based on the statistics that in 1900, only 4.4% women were managers, in 2000, 46% women were managers and in 2002, 34% of working women were managers and 50% of women were working in the sales, services and administrative support. The idea Lanier presented was that women are not getting the chance to enter into the sectors where they could attain significant managerial and leadership positions. The researchers, who have found that women leaders appear to be more participative, usually argue that increasing number of women’s role as leaders in the work places is because of the leadership traits of women. On the other hand Ely & Rhode argue that the perceived assertive and dominant behavior of leaders makes the women atypical and unattractive for leadership roles. Significant work has been also done to determine the factors which are contributing to discourage the women’s role as leaders in the workplaces. In 1985, Nelson and Quick stated that career oriented women in organizations face various problems such as gender discrimination, stereotyping, social isolation and marriage work interface (Bhatnagar, 1988). Ceta Ramkhalwasnsingh from Canada argued that the policy framework and legislation in Canada support the increasing number of women leadership in various sectors however, there is not practical equality between men and women (UNHCR, 2007). Eupen (2009) found that women have achieved significant gains in the workplaces, which shows that glass ceiling is no longer there, however, the number of female leaders is still low for example, in the 50 large publicly traded corporations of EU, women account for only 11% of top executive positions and 4% of CEO, President and Board of Directors. To enhance the women’s role as leaders in the workplaces, equal opportunities should be provided to both men and women. The unequal opportunities may result in discriminatory practices at workplace. Various factors contribute towards reducing the women’s role as leaders such as lack of women role models and peers in mentoring networks (Ely & Rhode). They argued that career opportunities are diminished for women because women tend to take advantage of part time and flexible time as they have to spend more time on household responsibilities therefore, even after having more participative and transformational leadership styles, women are not active in leadership roles. Therefore, it is important to evaluate if flexible working hours for women and the other benefits provided to the women result in gender discrimination or not. The ratio of women working in the organizations is increasing significantly. However, still in most of the organizations, male employees are dominant. Unchallenged cultures of male dominance have a significant impact on females because under male dominance women may not fully share their thoughts or ideas and are unable to participate on equal basis and they are usually excluded from decision making processes (UNICEF, 2005). Most of the research studies consider male dominance as a discouraging factor for the women however, to what extent it negatively impact women’s role as leaders in the workplaces is still not clear. The male dominance in the organizations may pressurize the women to work under the supervision of male staff. Women have been also complaining about the disrespectful attitude of the male colleagues in organizations. Disrespectful attitude towards employees such as racial slurs, unwanted sexual attention, off color jokes and inappropriate touching is problematic in the workplaces (Pinsky, 2009). How disrespectful attitude create challenges for women to participate actively in organizational matters is still unexplored. Does negative stereotyping impact women’s role as leaders in the workplace? The gender stereotypes are the generalizations about men and women. The feminine stereotypes like friendliness and sensitivity are not considered favorable for leadership therefore, as compared to men; women are being evaluated less positively for leadership positions (Catalyst, 2005). Such gender stereotypes may also impact the role of the women. In 1989, Eagly and Mladinic argued that men take the advantage of social positions of power and status stereotypes relative to women (Hebl, 1995). Actually gender stereotyping has been identified in all cultures, no matter less or high. Most of the women and men have been the victim of gender stereotyping in their personal and professional lives. According to Hong, Veach & Lawrenz (2003), in Taiwan gender stereotyping is ubiquitous because the culture is male dominated and women are placed in subordinate roles and are entitled to unequal treatment. Therefore, researchers have been eager to determine the impact of feminine stereotyping on the performance of the female workers. Evaluating its impact on women’s role as leaders will be very significant to identify the challenges women face in effective leadership. Therefore, most of the researchers have highlighted gender discrimination, stereotyping and disrespectful attitude towards women in workplaces. However, very small work has been done to study the impact of these factors on the role of women as leaders in organizations. In order to bridge this gap and to study the impact of these factors in real working environment, this research study is being proposed. McEldowney, Bobrowski and Gramberg (2009) found that women are underrepresented in top leadership positions such as proportion of women on corporate board is 16 percent and this number is even low in the case of developing economies. The research study of McEldowney and his fellows provide significant information about the factors posing challenges for women as leaders in the work places. The proposed research study has selected McEldowney and his fellows’ research work as the base study. The factors identified by them will be analyzed in the proposed research study however; the methodology will be entirely different. McEldowney and his fellows selected the participants who had attended a week long leadership seminar. On the other hand, in the proposed research study, the impact of these factors will be studied in the real working environment. Therefore, it is expected that the proposes research study will be really useful for the managers, academicians and researchers to understand the challenges women face while climbing up the corporate ladder to achieve the top managerial positions. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES The primary aim of conducting this research is to highlight the challenges which women face when they climb up the corporate ladder to achieve top leadership positions. Some other aims and objectives which will be also achieved through this research study are as follows: Another aim of this report is to determine whether women leadership behavior is more compassionate and participative relative to men. It is important to learn about women leadership traits because although it is assumed that women have transformational leadership style, still the number of women working on the top leadership positions is significantly low. The research study will also determine whether discriminatory practices at workplaces negatively affect the women’s role or not. The objective of this research study is also to evaluate whether domination of men in organizational decision making and top management positions affect the women’s role negatively or not. It is important to investigate through this research study that how disrespectful attitude towards women impact the participation of women in organizational matters. Another objective of this research study is to determine the impact of negative stereotyping in reducing the women’s morale to participate actively in organizational matters Moreover, this research study will be very important to under the challenges women have been experiencing and they are likely to face in their future, while approaching the leadership positions and roles. By analyzing the factors which negatively impact the women’s roles as leaders, recommendations could be made. Therefore, this research study will be very useful for the managers to encourage women’s role as leaders in the workplaces. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY This research study will be a descriptive kind of research, in which various factors and their impact on women’s role has to be evaluated. Both the qualitative and quantitative research approaches will be used in this research study. The data for this descriptive research study will be collected and in order to test the hypotheses the primary data will be collected through a questionnaire. Quantitative research approach will be used by collecting numerical data to investigate the research hypotheses and to analyze the data through deductive process. To achieve the primary data, a survey will be designed, in which questionnaires will be got filled from the selected sample. The aim of conducting the quantitative research is to collect primary through which findings could be drawn and original analysis could be presented. Since an extensive narrative data will be collected to gain insights into the proposed research question, therefore, qualitative analysis will be conducted. Qualitative method will be used to support the findings drawn from primary research. The secondary resources, theories and concepts will be used for qualitative analysis. Actually, most of the studies conducted on women leadership are very recent because prior to that, men dominated in the workplaces. Consequently, the very old research studies have focused on the leadership traits of men. The aim of the qualitative analysis will be to evaluate the leadership style of women and its suitability in today’s business environment. Moreover, qualitative analysis of secondary data will also help to analyze the factors which have been contributing towards diminishing the roles of women as leaders. The findings drawn from the quantitative analysis will be backed by secondary sources. And finally analysis will be done, based on which, recommendations will be provided. Population and Sample To investigate the research question, a survey will be designed. Total ten organizations will be selected and total female employees of the selected ten organizations will be the population of this research study. Studying the total population is impractical, costly and unnecessary; therefore, a sample will be selected out of the total population. Random sampling methodology will be used to select the sample. Since the total female population of ten organizations will be significantly large therefore, it will be either difficult or impossible to select every member of the population; therefore, random sampling has been suggested. Total 500 females from the ten large companies will be selected. Since the focus of the study is to analyze the factors affecting the women’s role as leaders in the workplaces, therefore, both the private and public sector organizations will be selected. Most importantly, the selected organizations will be large companies and not the small or medium enterprises and their employee population will be above 250. In each of the ten organizations, 50 questionnaires will be sent. The participants from various public and private organizations will be from diverse educational backgrounds and professions. RESEARCH DESIGN The methodological framework for this research study has been shown in diagram. The hypotheses have been proposed which will be investigated by collecting the primary data. Based on the correlation and relationship between the dependent and independent variables, analysis will be conducted. Table: Process Flow Chart for the Methodology of Research Instrumentation and Data Collection The data will be collected through a questionnaire which will be the same for every participant. The questionnaire will be divided into seven sections. The first section will have the questions to collect demographic information of the participants. The data on sex, experience, designation, marital status and academic qualification will be collected in this section. The second section will be designed to collect data on the leadership styles and behavior of the women. Likert scale of 5 will be used to rate each question asked. 1 will represent “Strongly Disagree” whereas, 5 will represent “Strongly Agree”. The third section will be used to analyze the impact of discriminatory practices on women’s role as leaders in the workplace. Various items of discriminatory practices will be used to obtain data on discrimination. The fourth section will be designed to obtain data on “Male domination” at workplaces. Through different items, Male Domination scale will be constructed. The section five will comprise of items of disrespectful attitude. The data obtained from this section will be used to analyze the impact of disrespectful attitude on women’s role as leaders. The sixth section will be designed to collect data on gender stereotyping. Finally, the seventh section will contain the questions on different roles of women at the workplaces. The data collected through questionnaires will be in coding form and it will be fed into Microsoft Excel for further analysis. Data for each participant will be organized according to the sequence of the questions asked in the questionnaires. Dependent and Independent Variables Total six variables will be used in this research study. The five dependent variables include Leadership Behavior, Discrimination, Disrespectful Attitude, Male Domination and Gender Stereotyping. The only independent variable will be the Women role. The mentioned dependent and independent variables will consist of different items. The leadership behavior will be defined by using leadership traits. The discrimination variable will be defined by using proportion of male to female at work, on senior and junior management positions, board of directors and decision making processes. The disrespectful attitude will be defined by the items such as body language and communication of male colleagues, violence and sexual harassment. The Male Domination variable will be defined by the items such as proportion of male on supervisory positions, board of directors. Gender Stereotyping will consist of items such as friendliness, sensitivity, emotional intelligence, personality traits and social obligations. Moreover, the independent variable, Women’s role will be defined by items including participation of women in decision making and top management positions. Planned Method of Analysis The information collected through questionnaires will be in numerically coded form. To analyze the data to prove or disprove the hypotheses, SPSS software package will be used. Different statistical tools of SPSS Software will be used to analyze the data. Before analyzing the data reliability of the research study will be determined by conducting internal consistency analysis. To determine internal consistency of the questionnaire the Cronbach’s Alpha will be calculated. It is very important to analyze whether the items selected to build the scales are appropriate enough to explain the relationship between variables or not. Frequency analysis will be conducted to analyze the response of the participants for each question asked. Mean and Median will be also calculated to analyze different trends in the data. To test the hypotheses, correlation analysis will be done. Correlation analysis will identify the correlation between the dependent and independent variables such as discrimination and women’s role. Finally, cross tabulation analysis will be used to analyze the responses of participants against any two variables. For example, how many women who believe that male domination at workplaces reduce their role in decision making also believe that policies of the company should explicitly show the proportion of male and female on senior management positions? Limitations and Assumptions It is an academic research report therefore, its scope is limited. The findings of the research study will be derived from the sample taken from ten organizations. Therefore, it may not have implications in other cultures. It has been assumed that the sample selected for this research study fairly represent the population. Moreover, the self interest of the participants and their socially acceptable answers main impact the findings of this report. Another limitation of this data is the human error. Since all the data will be fed into the Excel Sheet and SPSS Software, therefore, chances of human error are there. Still, the efforts will be made to reduce the error to a great extent. Moreover, the study will be significant to study the impact of various factors on women’s roles as leaders in the workplaces, regardless of the scope of the study. TIME SCHEDULE The following table presents the tasks and activities that will be performed while conducting this research study. The starting and ending date, along with total duration required for each activity has been mentioned. Table: Timeline Number Tasks Start Date Finishing Date Duration 1 Selection of topic       2 Developing research question       3 Defining scope and limitations       4 Selection of variables       5 Creating Literature Review       6 Developing Research design and methodology       7 Submission of research proposal       8 Approval of proposal       9 Designing questionnaire       10 Data collection       11 Arranging the data       12 Application of statistical technique or SPSS       13 Inference of the findings       14 Presentation of the conclusion       15 Identification of the implications       16 Proposition for future research or recommendations       17 Compiling all written material       18 Detailed review of the research       19 Submission of final report       RESOURCES NEEDED The facilities and resources that will be used to conduct this research are as follows: Internet and computer facilities Letters of approval Journal Articles Digital Library SPSS Software Microsoft Office including MS Excel and MS Word PERSONNEL The participants of this research study will be the active employees of the selected ten organizations. All participants on the research study will be the female employees and they will be the active staff members of the organizations. The willingness of the female employees will be taken before handing over the questionnaires to them. To ensure the privacy of information, the participants will be asked not to mention their names on the questionnaires. Therefore, in this way, the participants will be able to give free of pressure opinion. BUDGET Since most of the work is related to the internet and conduction of surveys, the costs primarily included internet charges and travelling charges along with SPSS software charges. Since it is an academic report therefore, it will be a low budgeted research study. Budgeted Items Funds Required Travelling Expenses Internet Charges Journal or digital library access charges Printing and Binding charges Software Charges Miscellaneous or Others Total Budget NEEDED ASSURANCES/CLEARANCES The survey will be conducted in the selected ten organizations. Therefore, before conducting the survey, getting approval from the relevant authorities is very important. A letter will be signed from the professor and it will be shown to the organizations to get permission for conducting the survey. To avoid information misuse, it will be ensured that information collected will be only used for academic purpose. Moreover, the information drawn from the research study will be shared with the organizations and it will be also ensured that no data manipulation happens. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bhatnagar, D. (1988). Professional women in organizations: New paradigms for research and action. Retrieved September 19, 2010, from http://www.springerlink.com/content/h2431w51w4652586/ Catalyst. (2005). Women “Take Care,” Men “Take Charge:” Stereotyping of U.S. Business Leaders Exposed. Retrieved September 18, 2010, from http://www.w2wventures.com/WomenTakeCareMenTakeCharge.pdf Desvaux, G., & Devillard, S. (2008). Women Matter: Female Leadership, A Competitive Edge for the Future. Retrieved September 18, 2010, from McKinsey & Company: http://www.mckinsey.com/locations/swiss/news_publications/pdf/women_matter_2_english.pdf Eagly, A. H., & Johannesen-Schmidt, M. C. (2001, June 22). The Leadership Styles of Women and Men. Retrieved September 18, 2010, from Journal of Social Issues: http://www.genderinscience.org/downloads/Consensus_Report_references/Eagly%20and%20Johannesen-Schmidt%202001.pdf Ely, R., & Rhode, D. L. (n.d.). Women and Leadership: Defining the Challenges. Retrieved September 18, 2010, from http://www.hbs.edu/leadership/docs/ElySumm.pdf Eupen, S. v. (2009). ‘Female leadership for a sustainable European Management Model (EMM)’. Retrieved September 18, 2010, from http://www.eurocadres.org/IMG/pdf/Sophie_VAN_EUPEN_Literature_study.pdf Hebl, M. R. (1995, October ). Gender Bias in Leader Selection . Retrieved September 18, 2010, from http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~hebl/1.pdf Khankhoje, D., Kb, V. D., & Kumar, M. (n.d.). ADVANCES IN WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP STYLES: IMPLICATIONS ON SUBORDINATES’ COMPETENCIES IN AN NGO. Retrieved September 18, 2010, from http://www.istr.org/conferences/toronto/workingpapers/khankhoje.dilip.pdf L Models . (n.d.). Concepts of Leadership . Retrieved September 19, 2010, from http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/leader/leadcon.html Lanier, P. A. (n.d.). WOMEN AND MINORITIES IN MANAGEMENT. Retrieved September 19, 2010, from http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/management/Tr-Z/Women-and-Minorities-in-Management.html McEldowney, R. P., Bobrowski, P., & Gramberg, A. (2009, August 11). Factors affecting the next generation of women leaders: Mapping the challenges, antecedents, and consequences of effective leadership. Retrieved September 18, 2010, from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jls.20105/abstract Pinsky, E. (2009, November 11). The Danger of Disrespect—Bullying, Harassment and the Bottom Line. Retrieved September 18, 2010, from http://www.humanresourcesiq.com/article.cfm?externalid=1439 UNHCR. (2007). WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP ROLES. Retrieved September 18, 2010, from http://www.un.org/womenwatch/feature/women_leadership/On-line_discussion_report_Women_in_Leadeship_Roles.pdf UNICEF. (2005, September). Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children. Retrieved September 18, 2010, from http://www.unicef.org/emerg/files/male_roles.pdf Read More