Abstract
Although gender has been identified as an important antecedent in workplace mistreatment research, empirical research has shown mixed results. Drawing on role congruity theory, we propose an interactive effect of gender and bottom-line mentality on being the target of mistreatment. Across two field studies, our results showed that whereas women experienced more mistreatment when they had higher levels of bottom-line mentality, men experienced more mistreatment when they had lower levels of bottom-line mentality. In another field study, using round-robin survey data, we found that team gender composition influenced the degree to which the adoption of a bottom-line mentality by female team members was perceived to be a gender norm violation, which subsequently predicted their likelihood of being mistreated. Specifically, women who had higher (vs. lower) levels of bottom-line mentality were more likely to be perceived to violate gender norms in teams with a lower proportion of women, and in turn, perceived gender norm violation was positively associated with being mistreated.We discuss theoretical and practical implications of our findings and directions for future research.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 854-865 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Journal of Applied Psychology |
Volume | 107 |
Issue number | 5 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Oct 4 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The authors are grateful to the University of Minnesota for supporting Study 1a via Dean’s Small Research Grant, Georgia Institute of Technology for supporting Studies 1b and 2, and Yonsei University for supporting Study 2 via 2020-2 Future-Leading Research Initiative. The last author Seongsu Kim received financial support from the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea, the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018S1A5A2A03029031) and from the Institute of Management Research and the Institute of Industrial Relations at Seoul National University.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021. American Psychological Association
Keywords
- Bottom-line mentality
- Gender
- Gender norm violation
- Mistreatment
- Team gender composition
PubMed: MeSH publication types
- Journal Article