Contact: Helen Paxton, Director of Communications, Rutgers Graduate
School of Management, 201/648-5177, [email protected]
DO BLACK WOMEN MANAGERS HAVE TO ACT WHITE? OR MALE?
Black women managers exhibit characteristics that give them exceptional strength, says Assistant Professor DT Ogilvie of Rutgers Graduate School of Management. They are more likely to have male-associated traits as well as female ones, to sense gender inequality strongly, to be able to handle several roles at once, and to break down traditional constraints.
It took business a long time to recognize that women might
manage differently from men. At first, the same criteria were applied:
are they as aggressive, as autocratic, as directive? But, slowly,
business has now come to recognize that women do differ, and that
these differences can be capitalized on to make superior managers.
The literature on women's management styles is extensive.
But the literature on racial differences of women managers?
Forget it.
Partly, probably, because they have less evidence to work
with, but mostly, no doubt, because it never occurred to them that there
might be some differences, scholars have stayed away from looking
into black women's versus white women's managerial styles.
Not so Rutgers' DT Ogilvie. In the lead article in the current
issue of The Leadership Quarterly, she and her co-author, Prof. Patricia
Parker of Arkansas Tech, argue that it's time for business to recognize
that black women managers can be as different from white women
managers -- and from black men managers -- as white women are from
white men. Among those who have shown interest in this research is
the U. S. Army.
Drawing on research in a number of tangential areas -- mainly
studies of family relationships, gender, communication, sociology, and
leadership -- the article points to a number of specific
already-established differences and calls for further study of their
application to management styles.
One is that black women tend to have traits traditionally
associated with both male and female behavior. In addition to the
attributes that past research has found to be characteristic of women --
supportive, caring, considerate -- black women rank high also in the
traditional masculine strengths -- autonomy, strength, independence,
and self-confidence.
Second, black women have been shown to be considerably
more aware of gender discrimination than their white counterparts are.
Studies have shown that they feel more strongly than any other group
that women are not being accorded equal treatment. Like all minority
groups they acknowledge racial discrimination too, but they feel the
gender discrimination more than any other group does.
Third, black women have been shown to rank high on the
behavioral complexity scale. They manifest ability to handle several
behavioral roles at the same time and to keep them separate, a skill
that should serve them well in management positions.
Finally, they rank high also in creativity and
"boundary-spanning," or the ability to break down traditional
constraints and formulate new and more useful structures and roles.
All these things, Prof. Ogilvie says, almost certainly mean
that black women have management styles that differ from those of
other groups, at least as much as women's have been shown to differ
from men's. It's time, she says, for investigators to look beyond
gender in their studies and to consider ethnicity
as well.
Professor DT Ogilvie came to Rutgers in 1994 from the University of
Texas, where she earned her PhD in Strategic Management. Earlier in
her career she served as Business Planning Manager/Strategic
Planning, as Information Systems Planning Manager, and as Franchise
Planning Analyst, for the Southland Corporation.
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