UB research on gender and leadership emergence wins award

By Matthew Biddle

BUFFALO, N.Y. — A study on gender and leadership led by a University at Buffalo School of Management alumna and professor has been honored with the top award from the journal Personnel Psychology.

Katie L. Badura, PhD ’19, assistant professor of organizational behavior in the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business, and Emily Grijalva, assistant professor of organization and human resources in the UB School of Management, led the study’s team in aggregating nearly 60 years of research from 136 independent studies documenting the gender gap in leadership emergence.

Their paper demonstrated that, despite progress in recent decades, men are still more likely than women to be perceived as leaders. Further, the authors advanced a theory examining specific personality traits and corresponding differences in individuals’ participation in group discussion, and how that contributed to the gender gap.

The editorial board of Personnel Psychology, which published the article in August 2018, selected the study for the Best Paper Award based on its Google Scholar citations, downloads from the journal’s website and the paper’s contribution to research on people at work.

Badura and Grijalva’s co-authors were Daniel A. Newman, professor of psychology and labor and employment relations, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Thomas Taiyi Yan, assistant professor, UCL School of Management; and Gahyun Jeon.

The project was partially supported through a grant from the UB Gender Institute.